DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 2001, India. Starring Shahrukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Danny Denzongpa, Rahul Dev, Hrishitaa Bhatt, Gerson Da Cunha, Subhashini Ali, Umesh Mehra, Sooraj Balaji. Written and directed by Santosh Sivan. Buy it from Amazon.

Writing reviews of bloated historical epics is a bit difficult for me. On the one hand, they comprise one of my favorite categories of film. I love watching a cast of thousands get gussied up in peplum tunics and armor then go tearing about vast landscapes with spears and catapults hurling big flaming balls (though I reckon you can't actually go tearing about the landscape with a catapult). I love the sinister palace intrigue, the lavish sets, the gratuitous dance numbers performed by scantily clad women, the blustery overacting, and of course the giant battle sequences. On the other hand, these sorts of films rarely lend themselves to the types of reviews I like to write, if for no other reason than so many people have already heard of the films. What's new that I could possibly add? Sometimes I get a break, of course. Because many people my age and younger missed a good many of these films, I can discuss them without feeling like I'm going over the same "did you know" talking points. So I will review The Vikings starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, but I would never review Cleopatra, despite the fact that I love the film dearly. You don't need me to tell you about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, though, just as you don't need me to repeat the gossip about Richard Burton and Liz Taylor's torrid behind-the-scenes love affair.

At other times, epics come along possessed of such a profound gravity that my usual jokey demeanor seems unsuitable for the subject matter. King Hu's monumental A Touch of Zen is another of my favorite movies, but my attempt to write a review of it was disappointing, at best. A film like that demands a much cleverer, well-developed analysis than my usual stock company of, "Hey! Boobies!" In my darkest hours, I am capable of writing such pieces; I just don't find them appropriate for Teleport City, where I like to keep things as light and frothy as a Candy Johnson go-go routine (some of my older, overly self-important reviews not withstanding).


I sometimes sit and ponder these conundrums for a few minutes, before I finally wave my hand in dismissal and figure I should just get on with reviewing something, and if it happens to be a big ol' epic movie full of heavy themes and grandstanding thespians, then so be it. So it is that I come to the lavish Indian epic Asoka, which among, other things, is going to allow me to rectify some of the poor work I did writing about A Touch of Zen years ago, because both films share quite a bit both structurally and thematically, though only one of them has a Shahrukh Khan bathing scene every half hour.

But first, let's indulge in some history. All things considered, I had a pretty fair education. I lucked into a string of great teachers in high school at a time when we had a nice blend of forward thinking "progressive" education and classical book learnin' -- which is a fancy way of saying we were expected to learn about stuff then also think about it. Still, even though I had fairly intensive world civ classes back in the day, they were still hamstrung by the usual Western cultural bias, meaning that we learned a lot about the Greeks and Romans, a fair amount about the Egyptians (who may be African, but they knew Greeks and Romans, so Western Civ classes are cool with them -- plus, you know, like mummies and stuff), a smattering of things about the Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians, and then plenty about medieval Europe. When it came to Asia, however, we learned basically that countries in Asia did, in fact, exist at various points in history, and two of them were called China and Japan. Beyond that -- not so much with the education. Still, it's more than we learned about Africa excluding Egypt. The sum total of my knowledge regarding Africa would lead me to believe that there were the Egyptians, and then there were the unfortunate folks who got rounded up during the slave trade. Any other traces of culture, history, and civilization pertaining to Africa I may have gotten was gleaned entirely from the pages of Tarzan and Solomon Kane pulp novels, and it turns out they may not have been the most reliable of historical sources.

If we were and continue to be short-changed in our scholastic enlightenment as pertains to China and Japan, that's nothing compared to what we learned about India, which was pretty much nothing. But then, honestly, who would want to learn anything about India? I mean, a giant country full of some of the most colorful customs, outlandish legends, and monstrously fantastic gods? What kid would want to learn about that when they could be learning about Charlemagne for the fourth year in a row? Not that I have anything against Charlemagne, mind you, or against learning the highlights of Western Civ. I quite love it all, actually, but after hearing about Charlemagne over and over again, I could have used a little aside about Asoka or the first emperor of China or something, anything, other than the Magna Charta yet again.

India fares even worse than Japan and China, because at least the lack of education regarding the histories and cultures of those two countries was supplemented by some exposure to their current pop culture. Kungfu movies and Godzilla may not teach you much about a country that would impress a historian, but you do learn something about another country; even if the events on screen might not be entirely historically accurate (though I'm pretty sure Five Deadly Venoms is 100% historically verifiable, even the part about the guy walking up walls), you learn what people in those other countries watch, and from that you can start to branch out (though the dry wing of film studies would have you believe that to understand a nation's cinema, you have to watch the art films none of the people in that country actually watch). If nothing else, at least it puts the country in your consciousness. It was early exposure to things like Ultraman and Bruce Lee that got me interested in Japan and China, and even if my school was lacking in a curriculum that paid much attention to these places, at least I knew I wanted to learn about them on my own.


But not India. There was no pop culture presence for India in the United States, at least not in Centerfield, Kentucky in 1979. I didn't even know enough about India to know if I wanted to know anything about India. I knew where it was on a map, and I knew there were an awful lot of people there, but that was pretty much it. As to the cultures and customs, to say nothing of their pop entertainment and movies, I knew so little that it never even occurred to me such things might exist.

I wised up, eventually, though my entry into trying to pick up some knowledge pertaining to India was a pretty late arrival on the playing field already occupied by players from China and Japan, as well as the usual lot from England, Italy, France, Mexico, and the good ol' United States of America. Even after I started catching glimpses of "Bollywood" films here and there, or hearing descriptions of them, India remained a strictly b-team affair, partly because this was the pre-Internet, pre-DVD era, and procuring films from India without being near a major center of Indian population was viciously difficult. It was hard enough tracking down Jackie Chan movies from Hong Kong, but at least there was an established network into which one could tap.


Things didn't start to change until I moved to New York City. Hong Kong and Japan were two film industries in serious decline by that time (late 1990s). I'd seen as many of the old films as were available at the time, and the new films were pretty horrible. I ended up living on East 5th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, which for those of you unfamiliar with the geographic make-up of New York City and the East Village, is right next door to Kojak's old precinct, but also right next to the string of Indian restaurants that populated 6th Street. Around the same time, I picked up a book called Mondo Macabro by Pete Tombs, and read with excitement the descriptions of insane Indian horror films from the 1980s. Satiated as I was with all things Hong Kong and Japan, I decided to try and find some of these movies. Luckily, nestled in between the row of restaurants that were my neighbors was a video store that stocked Indian films. It wasn't exactly easy going. None of the videos had English titles on them, and the horror films about which I'd read were pretty much the pariahs of the Indian VHS world (more about that when I review one of them, though). Still, thanks to a couple helpful employees, I was able to stumble across a few horror, fantasy, and action films that would appeal to me.

Even then, it wasn't easy to get into the movies. They were long, for one, and had no translations. This was nothing new for me, but deciphering an untranslated kungfu film from the 70s is a lot less difficult than trying to unravel the myriad plots and subplots of the typical Bollywood masala film without benefit of familiarity with the cliches, formulas, or stars. Plus, the VHS tapes were of uniformly dreadful quality, often interspersed with commercials or scrolling advertisements. I once rented a freaked-out horror film called Cheekh only to find that the tape had a scrolling advertising ticker running not at the top or the bottom of the screen, but right through the middle! For the whole movie!


Given the circumstances, Bollywood failed to click with me at that time. But it kept getting mentioned here and there in various books, and the photos always looked promising. If only there was a source for movies that didn't have ads for basmati rice and attorneys plastered over the picture. Then came the Internet, and more importantly DVDs. Suddenly, I could do a search for Indian films and turn up all sorts of sources that had never been accessible to me before. And best of all, rather than paying $20 for a VHS dupe with copious on-screen ads and no subtitles, I could pay $3.99 for a DVD with subs and a widescreen presentation of the movie. Those old horror films were still MIA, but I was finally able to learn names like Dev Anand and Amitabh Bachchan. The first Bollywood film I ever purchased was Don.

If you are wondering what the hell all this has to do with Asoka, then you must not have read many of my previous reviews. It's always important to me to set the stage and explain not just how I felt about a certain film, but why I feel that way and what went into making me feel that way. This often manifests itself in the form of long-winded, meandering stories about VHS tapes. Bear with me.

Of course, there was no going back after that, and while I logged many hours watching Bollywood films, they remained more or less absent from my review repertoire since I was still fairly ignorant of India in general and Indian film in particular. I wrote an early, clumsy, but enthusiastic review of Don, but one could hardly claim that it boasts very much in the way of insight into or history about the stars, production, or climate in which it was made. Mostly, I just thought Amitabh was a bad-ass with a truly epic collection of bow-ties. So I set out on a quest to educate myself a little more, and while I didn't think that I would be able to increase my Bollywood superpowers to the point I'd advanced my Hong Kong action cinema powers, I figured I could at least not try to sound like a complete moron. So here I stand before you, now, an incomplete moron.


It's only very recently that I feel I've acquired enough experience to write somewhat competently about Indian movies. It's still not an easy subject to learn about. There are a lot of books about Bollywood cinema, but the vast majority of them stick to the safe and predictable, discuss the same movies (how many essays about Mother India must I read?), and treat the whole of Bollywood cinema as if it is a dry academic topic that must be handled with humorless sincerity and absolutely no sense of the fun and pageantry that appears in the movies themselves. While I enjoy exploring the ins and outs of such serious theoretical approaches and feel they are an important aspect of understanding cinema, they are by no means the sole defining factor of film. Myopically focusing on the dry academics and critical theory, especially in a populist cinema like India's, seems to exclude a massive piece of the puzzle.

In short, where's the fun? Where's the source material that embraces the wide variety of Indian cinema, from Mother India to the shameful and sleazy horror films of the Ramsay Brothers? From Sholay to Mithun fighting ninjas? It wasn't really out there. And while we're better off now than we were even a decade ago, when you would think based on what we see and read in the West the whole of Indian cinema was comprised of the collective works of Satyragraha Ray, we still want for a really smart but enthusiastic embrace of both the serious and the absurd in Hindi film.

And don't even get me started on the lack of coverage for Tamil films.


The World Wide Web improves things a little bit, but most of the Indian film review sites focus on newer productions -- which is fine, for learning about newer productions -- or on the usual suspects and "classics" of Indian cinema. But people like me want to really dig into the dark and ignored crevasses of Indian genre films from the 60s and 70s. These remain wildly underrepresented online, especially compared with the vast body of well-written and informative sites that explore Italian cult cinema, or Hong Kong, or Japan -- among others.

Anyway, my point is this: I have like a hundred screencaps from Asoka, and to be able to use them all, I need a really long article. So you get this long, padded preamble in order to justify my many photos of Kareena Kapoor dancing or Shahrukh dumping water on himself.


No, wait. That's not my point at all. My point is this: you (and I) may not have learned a particular something (or many somethings, for that matter) back when were in high school. But that's not really an excuse. A little spark from something as disreputable as pop culture can end up with you actually learning a lot about a country and a culture. My journey to Bollywood was a procession of tiny crumbs scattered here and there in a vast forest, but every time I stumbled across a new one, it made learning more all the more enticing. I'm doing my best not to let this breadcrumb trail analogy end up with me being lured into Shahrukh Khan's gingerbread house (though I know many people who would be willingly lead into such a place). And this is how pop culture works at its best. It piques your interest, and from there, with any luck, you launch a greater exploration and come to a better understanding of other people. In other words -- I can learn the history of Japan, but it's Sonny Chiba and Bunta Sugawara that helps me strike up conversations with actual Japanese people. So it is too with India. I learn Amitabh and Shahrukh, and my interest in them becomes an interest in the actual history of both India and the Indian film industry. And from the jumping off point of analytical scholarly and historical surveys of Indian cinema, I learn the framework of discussing the films, and then can launch into the glorious backwaters of the weird and wonderful that so delights me from all the cinemas of the world.


In approaching a review of the film Asoka, for instance, there were several things I had to do before I could write a halfways decent review of the film. I had to learn about Shahrukh Khan, one of the reigning kings of Bollywood cinema. I had to learn about director/cinematographer Santosh Sivan. And not least of all, I had to learn who the heck Asoka was, as one can assume that a film called Asoka is going to have something to do with the actual Asoka.

Asoka is a pretty funny guy to know absolutely nothing about. In terms of ancient world history, he was a man the caliber of Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan or Qin Shi-huang, the first emperor of China. And like these men who were more familiar to me, Asoka embodies all that is noble and ruthless, admirable and despicable, about men who live lives of epic scale. These complexities in great men -- "great" referring to the scope of the accomplishments and the impact they had on the world around them more than being a description of their demeanor or potential as a drinking buddy -- make for superb cinema if you are willing to deal with these complexities. Many times, a movie is not, and you get a rather shallow, white-washed impression of the man (Julius Caesar more so than any of the others, at least in the West). More recent cinema has become obsessed with the deconstruction of the myth surrounding such historical figures, and so dwells almost exclusively on the negative. This is no more accurate a portrait than the over-simplified portrayals of previous decades. Caesar was a great man and a complete bastard. He was a champion of the people and a poison to the democratic traditions of the Roman republic. He was a hero to the Roman empire and a genocidal madman to the Germanic tribes against whom he waged bloody war. Those who live on such an epic scale defy easy classification as good or bad, exist in a realm almost beyond the confines of human morality, and contain traits and tendencies that illustrate the soaring best and shameful worst of a human being and are often in complete contradiction with one another.


And though we in the United States may be (unless, perhaps, our parents were from India) ignorant of him, Asoka is a man that exists on such a scale. Asoka was the son of a regional emperor by the name of Bindusara and a queen named Dharma -- keeping in mind that the emperor had a multitude of wives. Dharma was a relatively low-ranking member of Bindusara's harem, and got hitched to the emperor purely because there was a prophecy about her bearing a son who would become a great leader. The son ended up being Asoka, and whether you believe that the prophecy came true or we tend to live lives that force prophecies in which we believe to come true, he did indeed become a great leader. Although another of Bindusara's sons, Susima, was the likeliest to inherit the throne, Asoka's skill as a general and increasing status as a hero caused fear in Susima that Asoka, rather than he, would be named heir to the throne. So he manipulated the emperor into sending Asoka into exile. The young prince spent his time in exile in the neighboring kingdom of Kalinga, famous for boasting a Greco-Roman style of government in which a king shared power with a democratic parliament (there was, at the time, a fair amount of idea swapping between Hellenistic Greece and the kingdoms that would become India).

If there was another major superpower in India at the time, it was Kalinga. Their influence was widespread throughout northern India, the south of Asia, and because they were a seafaring race, may of the islands that would later become Malaysia and other South Asian island-countries. But the most notable aspect of Asoka's time in Kalinga, at least as it pertains to the movie, was his meeting with a young woman named Kaurwaki. I honestly don't know the extent of her role in actual history, but she's pretty important to the film, so I might as well mention her in this brief historical overview.


Asoka was eventually called back to Maurya in order to quell a rebellion in the kingdom of Ujjain. When he was wounded during that battle, Asoka was treated by Buddhist monks in secret for fear that Susima would send assassins to do Asoka in. Under the care of the monks, Asoka met and eventually married a woman named Devi. Eventually, Bindusara fell ill and, though he wanted to appoint Susima to the throne, a group of officials preferred Asoka, resulting in a familial and civil war that saw Asoka emerge victorious but with a new nickname: Chanda Ashoka, or Murderous and Heartless Asoka. He laid waste to the armies of his brother, and then laid waste to his brother, and from there launched a vast and reportedly quite bloodthirsty campaign to conquer -- or unite, depending on how you look at it -- all of India. Inevitably, this would bring him into direct conflict with Kalinga, and though Asoka was victorious in his war with Kalinga, the astounding bloodshed, slaughter, and devastation of the campaign forced Asoka into a revelation. It was, as the legends go, in the aftermath of the battles against Kalinga that Asoka the Evil was killed and Asoka the Great was born.

Renouncing warfare and violence -- something that was much easier to do once he has already conquered everyone -- Asoka applied himself to the philosophy of Buddhism and sought to spread the teachings across and beyond his vast empire. It was under Asoka that the great Indian monuments of Buddhism were erected (though one can't imagine what the Buddha himself would have thought of such pointless grandeur). And it was because of Asoka that Buddhism eventually spread throughout Asia, including to a neighboring kingdom some people were calling China. Somewhere, someone might have studied whether or not the empire of Asoka (which is pegged with a start date of around 232 B.C.) influenced Qin Shi-huang at all; he unified China in much the same way (and with much the same reputation, though without the part where he renounces violence and seeks Buddhist enlightenment) only a decade or so after Asoka's rise to power. Certainly the empire of Alexander the Great that rose and fell a century before cast a long shadow over Asoka's India, not just because of the influence of Greek culture but also because, like Alexander's kingdom, Asoka's empire was very much a cult of personality. When Asoka died, the empire he had forged quickly fell apart. As with Alexander, once the towering figure was removed from the situation, it was discovered that what he had built could not sustain itself without him.


Still, Asoka's story is one of the great stories of civilization, and while much of it is undoubtedly myth and legend mixed with historical fact (what history isn't), it's power as a tale of the unification of India and one man's redemption from the depths of warfare and violence remains one of the most compelling tales in the world. Which brings us, finally, to 2001 and the movie that shares names with the first emperor of India.

Directed by Santosh Sivan, one of the greatest cinematographers in the world, the big budget spectacle Asoka deals with the years between Prince Asoka's coming of age and his enlightenment at the end of the war with Kalinga. Much of what's in the movie serves as sort of "Asoka's greatest hits," though this being an epic, the historical facts and literary legends are augmented with plenty of speculative romance and dramatic fabrication, as well as assumptions that make good dramatic sense for a movie but apparently ruffled the feathers of many historians. Asoka is also a very accessible movie for people with no interest in Bollywood but who do have an interest in epic films. In fact, by epic film standards, Asoka is a very formulaic movie, and I don't say this as any sort of slight, because I love well-executed formula. And when it comes to executing formula, Asoka emerges as one of the great epics in the history of cinema. Everything that is familiar to fans of old epics from the 1960s is present here, and the one aspect of Bollywood filmmaking that remains a stumbling point for its being embraced by casual viewers in the West -- the musical numbers -- hardly seem out of place in a style of filmmaking that, even in the West, was always happy to take a break for a harem girl song and dance number in the palace. As a result, Asoka manages to be a very Indian film, but also a very Western film. In other words, it transcends nationality and becomes an epic.


Shahrukh Khan, the heir apparent to Amitabh Bachchan's throne of "God of Bollywood and Possible Ruler of India," plays the titular conqueror. Although Khan's pretty much the biggest name in Bollywood film these days (keeping in mind that Bollywood refers to a specific, albeit gigantic, portion of the Indian film landscape), since my interest has been in spy and action films from the 60s and 70s and crappy horror films from the 1980s, I was less familiar with him and his work than a billion other people. It's always nice to discover that a billion people know something you don't. The only other time I'd seen him is in the 1998 film Dil Se, on which Santosh Sivan worked as cinematographer, and a film I've been grappling with reviewing here for a long time now. I can't say he won me over with that film -- which is a very good film, but I was busy becoming as obsessed as Shahrukh's character with lead actress Manisha Koirala. Plus, SRK indulges in a pretty hefty bit of scenery chewing at the end in a performance that is just as compelling and disturbingly absurd as Jackie Cheung's freak-out at the end of John Woo's Bullet in the Head. It's not that I didn't like the guy, I just...well, I just didn't get it.

Well, now that I've watched Asoka, you can rest assured that I get it.

We actually first meet Asoka when he's a chubby little kid whose grandfather renounces the throne in order to seek peace and enlightenment. The young Asoka covets his grandfather's sword (read whatever Freudian subtext into sword coveting that you want -- Freudian interpretations always irritate me), but his grandfather insists that it's not just a sword, but is instead a demon whose only lust in life is to draw blood. It does not care from whom that blood is drawn. Asoka doesn't listen, though, and against his grandfather's wishes, he retrieves the sword from the river into which the old man threw it. While playing with it, however, he loses his grip and sends the sword flying into a bush, where it proceeds to bisect a baby bird Asoka had been admiring only moments before.


It's not subtle, of course. Epics may contain touches of subtlety, but their main themes and performances are bold and dramatic. This dramatic obviousness is not something unique to Bollywood, which is a cinema that rarely treasures the exceptionally subtle in any aspect; it is, instead, one of the global tropes of epic filmmaking. This is spectacle filmmaking in the classic sense of the phrase, and such filmmaking usually results in points being made rather heavy-handedly. I still think it's a nice moment, though, and an effective foreshadowing of the dark days that await the young prince.

From there we flash forward to Shahrukh as the prince, a man who seems to divide his time evenly between quelling rebellions and taking baths. The general outline of the historical legends are touched upon, though I don't know if the original texts spent so much time watching Asoka pour water on himself. Whatever the case, there are worse ways to spend a few hours than watching a shirtless Shahrukh emerge from the water in slow motion. For instance, you could be watching a shirtless Superstar Rajnikanth emerge from the water in slow motion. Or a shirtless Steve Buscemi. Or a shirtless Kent Chang. Or me. The movie covers the basics of the story -- Asoka's prowess on the battlefield, his love for his mother (Subhashini Ali), his rivalry with Susima (Ajit Kumar, who looks like a cross between Lars Ulrich and that guy who played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart). Where the movie begins to diverge from history is when Asoka goes into exile and meets Kaurwaki, here played with grace and energy by Kareena Kapoor. I don't know a whole lot about how big her role was in history, but I do know she was one of three wives and doesn't seem as important to the Asoka story as Devi (and the third wife was generally referred to as his primary queen). In the movie, however, Kaurwaki is the main dame and the motivation behind all that Asoka does.


Journeying incognito, Asoka soon learns that Kaurwaki is a princess of Kalinga, traveling with her young brother Arya (Sooraj Balaji -- a surprisingly tolerable and decent child actor, especially compared to the last cinematic child-prince I had to deal with -- ernie Reyes Jr. in Red Sonja), destined to sit on the throne of Kalinga if he can keep from being assassinated by scheming officials. Protecting the both of them is the menacing General Bheema (Rahul Dev), who owns even fewer shirts than Asoka and might be up to something nefarious. Given that his first experience with Kaurwaki is watching her dance madly around the countryside then writhe about in a waterfall, Asoka falls madly in love with her and joins the band. He's having a good time flirting with the fiercely independent Kaurwaki and cutting up assassins, but when word comes that his mother has fallen ill, Asoka returns to his kingdom and ends up leading the army against a rebellion. When he is lead to believe that Arya and Kaurwaki were killed in an assassination attempt, he has a breakdown. It is during this period that he is wounded and meets Devi, played by newcomer Hrishitaa Bhatt. Now, I've maintained for a while that Manisha Koirala might be the most beautiful woman in the world, despite the insistence of others that the title belongs to Aishwarya Ray. I may have to revise my statements, because Hrishitaa Bhatt is so devastatingly beautiful that it almost causes one physical pain just to look at her. You know those old myths about goddesses who are so gorgeous that any mortal who gazes upon them is instantly driven mad by their beauty? Well, that's about the level of Hrishitaa Bhatt. I know Kareena Kapoor is supposed to be the main attraction here, but damn...

Thinking his beloved Kaurwaki dead, Asoka marries Devi when she kills an assassin and thus becomes "spoiled goods" to her intended husband. The couple returns to Maurya, much to Susima's consternation. He is now convinced that Asoka plans to take the throne from him. When Susima orchestrates the murder of Asoka's mother, Evil Asoka is born. Yeah, you have a brother who is a proven master warrior and is foretold by destiny to become the greatest emperor in the history of India. So if you are a rival to his destiny, what do you do? Kill his beloved mother? Yeah, I don't think you really thought that one all the way through, Susima. That's like trying to teach Sho Kosugi a lesson my killing his son. You don't tame a ninja by killing his son, and you don't get Asoka off your case by killing his mother.


As Asoka takes the throne in bloody fashion then begins his violent campaign to conquer all of India, Kaurwaki and Arya manage to return to Kalinga and assume their rightful places as rulers of the kingdom. However, it soon becomes evident that Kalinga is the one mountain standing in the way of Asoka's aspirations of tyranny. Inevitably, because this is a movie, the war against Kalinga will bring Asoka back into contact with his beloved Kaurwaki, who he believes dead and who has no idea her beloved and rascally Pawan and the bloodthirsty Emperor Asoka are one and the same.

Let's get the bad out of the way, because frankly, most of what's wrong with this film doesn't really bother me. As with just about any historical epic, one has to take the events portrayed with a grain of salt. The movie hits the key points in the life of Asoka, but in order to create a more human story, Sivan fills in the gaps with a romantic adventure extrapolated from the history. Personally, I'm not all that hung up on how historically accurate the romance between Asoka and Kaurwaki may or may not be. In the world of egregious digressions from fact, it ranks pretty far below Braveheart's "king of England secretly sired by Scottish dissident" subplot. Sivan feels the need, obviously, to give some sort of motivation for Asoka's transformation from "generally nice guy" to "slaughterer of thousands," and while what Sivan came up with may not be "the truth," it's still a damn good story, and ultimately that's what matters to me when I am watching a movie (William Wallace being the secret father of the future king of England -- not so much with the damn good story).


Similarly, the costuming is far more stylized than historically accurate -- I'm not sure how many people would ride into any sort of battle wearing Kareena Kapoor's slinky "warrior queen" number, but once again, this is a spectacle, not a historical recreation, and what's most important in an historical epic isn't accuracy so much as it is the appearance of accuracy. Epics rely on certain easily recognizable key components to create a feeling of historical authenticity, and around those they may layer on much that is stylized and wildly anachronistic so long as it works within the framework of the movie. While the world of Asoka the movie may not be a thoroughly authentic recreation of the world of Asoka, it is never the less a believable ancient world setting, and anyone who watches and enjoys historical epics should find Asoka as easy to buy as any o the great Hollywood or Italian epics.

Both of these are superficial complaints lodged by some, though like I said, I don't find either of them the least bit distracting. I understand there may a fair amount that is anachronistic in the dialogue as well, but not being a speaker of Hindi, I'll leave that debate up to the Hindi linguists of the world. I don't know if they are all faking British accents, or how a British accent would sound in Hindi; but I do know these days, in the United states, if you want your historical epic to seem authentic, you have to fake a British accent, even if you are an American actor and even if the character you are playing is an ancient Greek or Macedonian. I'm sure if Asoka were being played by an American, he would have a British accent -- regardless of the colonial implications of giving the mightiest king in Indian history a British accent. Those are just some of the reasons you should be glad actual Indians made this movie. Also, if this was an American movie, it would star that dude from Harold and Kumar, since he is apparently the only employable Indian actor in the entire United States. Not that we wouldn't love to see Harold and Asoka Go to White Castles and Mount a Bloody Seige Against it which Eventually Results in the Unificiation of all Fast Food Restaurants Under the Banner of Asoka's Roaring Lion. Believe me, having had the task of putting the letters up on the marquee when I worked at a movie theater, no one wants to try and deal with a title like that.

The other lingering fault in Asoka is that, while the film expertly details his evolution from a generally likeable guy into an ambitious monster, his journey back from monster to enlightened savior is extremely brief. Some criticism has been lodged that the movie doesn't tell the full story of Asoka, but I don't really think that's a particularly worthwhile criticism. His journey toward revelation is the compelling piece of his life; once he has his epiphany standing amid the slaughter of the battleground, it become the tale of a penitent man spreading a philosophy throughout India. I'm sure someone could make a great movie about that, but it wouldn't be the same kind of movie as Asoka. Also, it would expand the running time to something like six hours. I think the first half of Asoka's life is what this film needs to cover, and that's what it does. However, I also believe that a bit more time could have been spent developing the reunion on the battlefield between Asoka, Kaurwaki, and the young Kalingan emperor Arya. After such a detailed and beautifully realized development up until that point, the resolution seems a bit abrupt.


But overall, I have to say that Asoka is one of my very favorite films, and one of the best epics I have ever seen -- easily the equal of Spartacus and Ben Hur both in terms of the spectacle it mounts (though it's on-screen opulence never quite measures up to Cleopatra standards -- but then, what the hell ever has?) and the development of the characters and philosophy behind the film. The film I would say it compares most favorably to, however, is King Hu's A Touch of Zen, which is another film that deals with the journey from warrior to Buddhist and features a scene that is strikingly similar to the moment at which Asoka has his revelation.

A Touch of Zen is about a group of heroic rebels who end up enlisting the aide of a brilliant young scholar in their crusade against oppressive government soldiers. Eventually faced with a seemingly unwinnable fight, the scholar suggests that they rely on wits as much as martial arts ability, and so devises a veritable "house of traps" by which they may even the odds somewhat. After the battle, in which they are victorious, the scholar strolls through the grounds of the castle and admires his own cleverness -- the many booby traps and automated weapons that laid waste to the enemy soldiers. He stops at each weapon, and the film cuts to a scene of that particular weapon being planned out on paper and tested against dummies. Then the scholar laughs in delight. This goes on for a bit, but then the scholar walks out into the courtyard and drops to his knees in horror as he is faced with a field covered in broken, bloody corpses. Lost in the details of his own designs, testing each weapon against dummies, the scholar never really makes the connection between his inventions and actual human suffering. It is only when he accidentally strolls onto the actual field of combat that the gory reality of what he has done sinks in.

It's very similar to Asoka, which mounts a gigantic battle for its finale, full of swordsmen, bows and arrows, charging cavalry, and stampeding elephants, then follows that with a scene in which Asoka (bathing once again -- I'm not sure if this is symbolic of Asoka's need to obsessively cleanse himself from his atrocities or of it's just a desire to get Shahrukh Khan shirtless and wet as often as possible -- perhaps both) is confronted by a young Buddhist monk who chastises the victorious king for the destruction he has wrought. Asoka's description of conquest and victory fall on deaf ears, however, and as the monk leaves, Asoka stares at his triumphantly raised fist, unclenches it, and realizes it is empty. From there, he wanders through the aftermath of the grand battle -- broken bodies, crying widows, ravaged lands -- growing increasingly disconcerted until, at last, he stumbles upon his own horse, given by him to Kaurwaki when Asoka was in exile, and realizes both that she was still alive and that she may be dead now as a direct result of his bloody campaign. It's not an entirely unique narrative technique, this "wander through the carnage and witness what you have done," sort of revelation, but it's still powerful.

Given how much he overplayed his acting last time I saw him, in Dil Se, I was expecting Shahrukh to once again launch into his flailing, over-the-top histrionics, but surprisingly, he keeps himself more reeled in, and the result is much more powerful. In fact, Khan's entire job of acting is brilliant throughout the movie, and he makes each of the various incarnations of Asoka believable. What's more, he makes the transformation from one Asoka to the next believable. And even though he's often seen in bad jackets doing jaunty dances in romantic comedies, he absolutely owns the character of Asoka in this movie, investing the legendary king with a perfect blend of enthusiasm, confusion, impish charm, and frightening anger. In short, he makes the legend into an actual, believable human being. For me, as someone who wasn't part of the cult of Shahrukh, it was easy to stop seeing the star and start seeing the character. Plus, you know, he gets to stay shirtless for almost the whole movie.

he also gets to do "the look," or as I call it, simply the "Shahrukh." It's maybe a bit difficult to explain, though if you've see it, you know it. He does it a lot -- that thing he does where he sort of smirks, sort of half smiles with slightly puckered lips, raises his eyebrows a little bit, maybe wiggles his head ever so slightly -- you know, either when he's interested in a girl or just playing little games with her. I'm going to compare it to the "Roger Moore" -- when Moore, as James Bond, would affect the same smart-ass smirk, cock his head slightly, raise his eyebrows, and nod almost imperceptibly to whatever dame tickled his fancy -- sometimes with the added bonus of a drink he could raise slightly in her direction. Together, they are masters of the look. A shame no one has put them together yet in a movie where all they do is walk through rooms full of beautiful woman and make the ladies swoon (umm, ignoring the fact that Roger Moore is 137 years old now).


Matching him step for step is Kareena Kapoor as the fierce warrior-queen Kaurwaki. Kapoor had very little movie experience before her role here, but you wouldn't know it from watching her. She brings a great balance of able fighter and vulnerable woman to the role and blends them both into a very convincing character. Her initial meeting with Asoka -- during which she is dancing through the hills and then bathing in a waterfall -- shows a wonderful transition between her tomboyish fighter side (stomping about, flinging around a staff) and the sexier, more regal side (writhing about in the water, as royalty are wont to do, naturally). She's a perfect mix of independent and vulnerable, and a very believable "strong woman." She is strong without sacrificing the feminine aspects of her character. Anyone can cast a woman in a butch male role and claim that it's a strong female, but it's not. It's cheap, it dismisses the womanness of the performer, and ultimately, all you've done is make a character that is a guy but with boobs -- and we have Rahul Dev on hand to fill that role. Kareena Kapoor's Kaurwaki manages to be fierce and feminine, and a much more complex and admirable version of the "strong female" than were she just a foul-mouthed killing machine.

Santosh Sivan relies heavily on the eyes of his two actors, frequently shooting them in extreme close-up, and Kapoor's eyes are incredibly expressive. She can do more with them than most actors can do with their whole bodies and all their vocal range.

But the real revelation here is one of the supporting actors. Last time we saw Danny Denzongpa here at Teleport City, he was wearing a red satin ninja uniform and trying to kill Mithun. And although he filled the role of a ninja named Ninja well, it was hardly the sort of role from which one could judge his acting ability. Asoka allows him to showcase one of the great truths of movies: that no one in the world is as good a performer as a well-seasoned character actor. Denzongpa plays a loud-mouthed ruffian named Virat, who at first makes it his mission in life to punch Shahrukh in the face, but later becomes the king's most trusted and loyal friend and bodyguard. Looking a bit like Antonio Sabata, Sr., Denzongpa turns in an incredible performance that meanders effortlessly from drunken bravado to humility to horror at what his friend becomes. His role reminds me a bit of Oliver Reed doing a similar turn as the aging gladiator manager in Gladiator. As good as Kapoor and Khan are, whenever Denzongpa steps on the screen, he seems to be saying, Now this is good acting." Bravo, Ninja!


The rest of the supporting cast performs ably. Sivan has a nice mix of experienced vets (Denzongpa, Shahrukh Khan), relative newcomers (Kareena Kapoor, Rahul Dev), and complete neophytes (Hrishitaa Bhatt). None of them let the movie down. Rahul Dev is superb as the Kalingan general who may be a secret assassin (the film is subtle about making us suspicious of him, but it definitely makes us suspicious of him), and aside from being maybe the most beautiful woman alive, Hrishitaa Bhatt invests her character with a tremendous amount of strength and power. Her reaction to Asoka's descent into madness and violence is a powerful mix of horror and disappointment that she able conveys through facial expressions and without ever falling back on clumsy shrieking or other obvious methods. She is a Buddhist, raised to believe in peace, and one absolutely believes the convictions of her character.

Despite how good the cast performs, the real star of Asoka is Santosh Sivan's direction. Sivan is, as I stated at some point a few decades ago when I started writing this long-winded review, probably one of the top cinematographers in the world. However, being a great cinematographer doesn't always translate into being a great director (as Peter Pau proved when he went from being a great cinematographer to being a wretched director with the Michelle Yeoh adventure film The Touch). Luckily, Sivan pulls it off with incredible skill. Every frame of Asoka is expertly rendered. Sets are gorgeously decorated and detailed. The whole movie is like a painting, with no detail left to randomness. He shoots a lot of close-ups, relying on Kapoor and Khan to tell the stories with their faces, and uses the whole of the widescreen format by placing the focus of attention at the far right and left of the shot. He also relies on a color palette that manages to be both over-saturated and lush as well as washed-out and bleak. As he proved with Dil Se, Sivan is a master of making the landscape one of the stars of the film, and he continues to do that with Asoka. Forests are vibrantly green and costumes burst with color, while the skies are relentlessly washed out and menacing. I don't think there's a blue sky in the entire film. The result is the creation of an almost fantastic world, warm and cold at the same time, as if the struggle between Asoka's warmth and love, and his violence and hatred, is being recreated in the forests and skies of the country.

Sivan also knows how to pace the film well. Although the focus is on the romance and the personal evolution of Asoka over scenes of action and violence, he knows how long to stick with one before he shifts to the other, with musical numbers thrown in at just the right moment. Sivan handles action with the same sort of lyricism that he handles the romance. Although most of the action scenes are not very long, there are quite a few of them, with the highlights being Asoka's taming of an unruly rebel through use of a ridiculously painful looking weapon called a snake sword, Asoka's defense of Kaurwaki and Arya from a band of assassins, and then the final battle between the forces of Asoka and the kingdom of Kalinga -- a battle easily on the grandest epic battle scale. For the more intimate fights, Asoka employs a fighting style called Kalarippayat, one of the oldest martial arts in the world (predating even kungfu and tai bo). Experts were hired to train the stars of the film, and Khan (and it looks like Kapoor as well) perform most of their own fights. Sivan shoots action largely in slow motion in order to accentuate the grace and beauty of the fighting style. The snake sword is one of the signature weapons of the style, and I have to say that, while I'm not really keen on being attacked with any sort of a weapon, I'd especially like to avoid the snake sword. It's somewhere between one of those flimsy Chinese swords and a metal whip, with two long, razor-sharp tentacles of thin metal that can be used to whip and slice up an opponent. Heck, I wouldn't even want to handle such a weapon, let alone be handled by it.

Finally -- yes, this review is going to eventually end -- there are the musical numbers. There are five (if I'm remembering correctly -- I did start writing this review in 1807, after all, and my memory is fading) numbers, with the dancing being shouldered by Kareena Kapoor for two of the numbers, a random gypsy woman in another, and Kapoor and another random beautiful woman for the final. Shahrukh does show up in two of the numbers to take his shirt off and get wet. Although the music is definitely modern, with a bit of a tribal flare similar to the music from Dil Se, and the dances are equally out of the time period, they somehow manage to work well. After all, the world of Asoka is only somewhat historical. It's also a stylized representation rather than straight-forward presentation, and keeping that in mind, the musical numbers work well. The musical aspect of Bollywood continues to be the one thing that keeps a lot of Western fans from embracing them, but like I said before, if you watch a lot of historical epics, you know they generally can't wait to have a scene where everyone sits around in an ornately decorated throne room while dancing girl flit about wearing next to nothing. In that sense, musical numbers might be a bit easier to accept in a film like Asoka than they would in a modern cops 'n' robbers film. And for the most part, they are woven into the fabric of the plot. The first song sees Asoka meeting and being smitten by Kaurwaki. The second is a throwaway number at a rowdy pub, or whatever the ancient Indian equivalent of a pub might have been. The other two both reflect the longing of one of the main characters for the other. And all of them are pretty drop-dead sexy.

Which is one last thing I should say about this film. It's pretty hot. I mean, I know we're learning a valuable lesson about Buddhism, but there's no getting around that just as Sivan renders his sets and locations gorgeously, he turns equal attention to presenting his characters. As I said, I never really thought of Shahrukh as all that sexy. Charming, perhaps. Goofily endearing, maybe. But not sexy. That all changes here, though. Historical epics have always pushed the boundaries of the amount of flesh and sex they could get away with showing. Often times, historical settings seemed to be little more than an excuse to show off as much flesh as possible. It was easier to do it in a fantastical setting like ancient Rome or Egypt than in a modern setting, though censors weren't always fooled by the historic trappings. Whatever the case, sex appeal and even a bit of exploitation have always been a key ingredient to spectacle filmmaking. And since Asoka really is spectacle filmmaking formula executed with near perfection, it's no big surprise that everything is infused with a heady mix of lusty sexuality and romantic sensuality. Epics were also some of the first movies to hold the male form up for the same sort of objectification often reserved for females, and Asoka certainly doesn't disappoint in that respect, either (between the two of them, Shahrukh and Charlton Heston have hours upon hours of screen time in epics, and yet I bet neither of them keeps a shirt on for more than ten minutes, tops). Although Kareena Kapoor writhes and slinks about and wears revealing clothing even when she's going to war, it's the men who show off the most flesh, even more so than the item girls from the dance numbers. Khan never once puts a shirt on. Similarly, Rahul Dev may be a bit scary looking here, but he has abs and pecs no flimsy piece of cloth could ever hope to contain.


There's no such thing as a perfect film, but Asoka might be a perfect epic, so long as one considers that even a perfect epic is still a flawed film. It has a powerful cast that strikes the perfect blend of grandiose bombast and subtle contemplation. Santosh Sivan exploits every centimeter of the widescreen format to present a lavish, artistic painting of a film. There are heavy messages delivered with a heavy hand. Big battles, small conflicts. Terrifying wars, charming flirtation. It's all told with a sweeping sense of romance and adventure. And at the center of events that changed the world, there is a simple tale of doomed love. Like all epics, Asoka has it's flaws, but I would still place it without hesitation among the very best epics ever made, and among the very best Bollywood films I've ever seen. Some hardcore Bollywood fans may be turned off by the presentation or feel that the movie is too "Western," but as I am a fan of the globalization of cinema and the free flow of films and influences without regard for nation-state borders (call me the Asoka of film), such complaints hold no merit for me. Asoka is a damn fine film from any country, and definitely one you can show even to people who are normally turned off by Bollywood cinema.

Labels: Bollywood, Director: Santosh Sivan, Historical Epics, Musicals, Stars: Danny Denzongpa, Stars: Kareena Kapoor, Stars: Shahrukh Khan, Year: 2001