On Jodhaa Akbar and Dismissive Reviews

I like Ashutosh Gowarikar. He stands out among contemporaries because of his commitment to a forgotten fact about cinema: technique must give in to the story. (Ingmar Bergman : "People don't see a picture, people see people"). His cinema is old school-it relies mostly on its cast, dialogues, intense close-ups and suchlike. It's more theater than cinema.

Granted, Jodhaa Akbar is longer than necessary and editing is not Gowarikar's forte. But the movie has a lot going for it.

Take Gowarikar's vision, for instance. Here is a director who uses a poilitical marriage between two people in history to reflect on the political marriage between two religions. Mark the bold interruption of a Maulanah's harangue on Islamic purity by a Krishna bhajan; Akbar's constant snides to said Maulanah, insisting upon the separation of huquumat from mazhab;and the use of semi-transparent curtains depicting the known-yet-unknown "other", with whom one happens to be welded by history. Show me one Bollywood film in the last decade to so depict the Hindu-Muslim equation.

Much of Gowarikar's screen spacetime is occupied by his actors. The characters get to speak through their dialogues, faces and their bodies. Which is why Ila Arun leaves a riveting impact, Aishwarya Rai is poise personified, and as Gowarkiar's center-of-most-frames-muse, Hrithik is simply outstanding. He embodies his director's vision of Akbar: a virile, romantic, individualistic emperor.

A truly perceptive criticism comes from Amrita Rajan, who wishes (as I do) that the darker side of power had made Akbar grayer than he is in the movie. One line (again, note how theatrical it is - Hrithik moves closer to the camera, occupying centrestage, and delivers this monologue), "Why do my near and dear ones fall under my sword's shadow?", just isn't enough.

Here, for completeness, is the brilliant Baradwaj Rangan's characteristically insightful review.

Jodhaa Akbar has all the grandeur and pomp of a Bollywood historical romance. Perhaps we, the audience, have moved away from such theater. Gowarikar's film is perhaps too much like the theatrical Mughal-e-A'azam, and our sensibilities are too multiplexed to appreciate that. It's way too easy to be dismissive of commercial Bollywood romances; engaging a filmmaker on his own terms, however, takes something else-something that our supposedly cinema illiterate (and therefore more egalitarian) audience seems to have.