Movie review: Jodhaa Akbar

I was impressed by Gowarikar's rendering of the movie. Maybe I never paid close attention, but I never spotted the continual link of national awareness elements in "all" his movies from lagaan, swades to Jodhaa. In Jodhaa he has repeatedly tried to show that muslims considered themselves part of "hindustan".  Shows the Sufi side of Islam and has Akbar raving about the importance of keeping the "state and church" separate. I am sure by this time Western philosophers were coming to similar understandings. (John Calvin was playing with these ideas probably at around the same time. I was thinking Akbar probably heard of such notions from traveling scholars. Happy to be wrong here.).



While watching this I began to think that a more serious movie maker could've thought of exploring Akbar's thought process on good governance. The whole aspect of challenging the religious elders in the court on religious tolerance could be made in a 20 episode TV series, easily. Then I thought, something like this might not even be watched by 1% of the public that queued up for this movie. Unfortunately we need simplistic messages to get across to larger masses of people. The interesting thing is that I just began to assume that this will have a positive effect on people who just brand all muslims as bad. Then I thought of this conversation with a friend. He was referring to an email thread about "Akbar being a bad ruler". This counter meme is likely to catch on more with the guys who are already wanting to think on those lines. I hope the movie leaves a more lasting impression on their conscious brains than the email threads.

Other than the subliminal message of national integration the tangent to the character of possessive "Maham Anga" (played very well by ila arun) was nice too. She gets jealous of her daughter-in-law like most mom-in-laws, but the movie takes this opportunity to show that even a great king like Akbar learnt able governance from small fights like these with his wife. Jodhaa teaches him to "trust but verify".

Oh and I liked the way Ash looks. They've done a decent job in enacting their characters I think. Of course one could argue that maybe Jodhaa could be portrayed as a bit more stronger woman. A new face would've worked better. Hrithik is good too. Some scenes with the side characters could've been dont better. But I will always have this crib with the Indian film industry. For some reason the 2nd rung character artistes (I count Kulbushan kharbanda and his likes as first rung character artists) seem to think that over dramatization is the key to acting well. Why the hell did they want to show Akbar taming a wild elephant is beyond me. That whole scene was sooo crappy. The good thing is the movie spares us the trouble of hating ourselves for buying the $10 ticket by not inserting untimely and long song and dance sequences.

All in all paisa-vasool. But I guess I was in need for very little mental stimulation at the end of a busy Friday too :)

On a side-note: Remember when they had Tipu Sultan on TV. We used to collect chocolate wrappers with Tipu sultan pictures on it and then exchange the wrappers for some useless gift. I wonder if they would still do that with something like Akbar :)