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MOVIE REVIEW : Brook’s ‘Mahabharata’ an Exhilarating Morality Play

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

“The Mahabharata,” says its bearded creator to an inquiring youth, “is the poetical history of mankind. . . . If you listen carefully, at the end, you’ll be someone else.”

Perhaps, but first, you have to get to the end, and it requires Herculean powers of concentration to absorb--in one setting--Peter Brook’s “The Mahabharata,” a three-hour filmed adaptation of his nine-hour play, which itself was adapted from a 2,000-year-old, 100,000-stanza epic Sanskrit poem.

A work of beauty and eloquence, “The Mahabharata” (at the Nuart) is indeed every bit as daunting as it sounds, yet it is an exhilarating experience. Imagine watching a film condensation of the Old Testament or of the entire cosmos of Greek mythology and you get an idea of “The Mahabharata’s” enormous complexity, the unfolding of its intricate family tree, in which humans may also be gods.

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Even so, you emerge from watching this film with the sense that Brook and his collaborators have brought to life one of world civilization’s literary cornerstones, an awe-inspiring expression of mankind’s attempt to make sense of the often baffling and terrifying human experience and to illuminate the faith, values and conduct essential for human survival and fulfillment.

Fortunately, the heart of this morality play is simple: a conflict between two families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, of common ancestry--i.e., the Cain and Abel motif. Indeed, the Pandavas are the descendants of King Pandu (Tapa Sudana), whose sons are fathered by the gods of earthly harmony, of the wind, of the king of the gods, of patience and of wisdom. The Kauravas, in turn, are the descendants of King Pandu’s blind brother Dhritharashtra (the late Ryszard Cieslak), whose pregnant wife Gandhari (Helene Patarot) produces a metallic ball that turns into a hundred sons, the oldest two of which become the villains of the piece.

Amid endless intrigue, conflict and incidents of the supernatural, various people begin to stand out. The two most striking figures are the two royal wives. Upon learning of the blindness of the husband-to-be she has yet to meet, Gandhari instantly expresses her devotion by donning a blindfold for the rest of her life. Kunti (Miriam Goldschmidt), Pandu’s No. 1 Wife, is pretty remarkable in her own right: Her mantra allows her to mate with the gods, and her first pregnancy produces Karna (Jeffrey Kissoon), the offspring of the sun. (One of the great moments of the film is the confrontation between the adult Karna and his mother, who asks his forgiveness for abandoning him as a baby.) In “The Mahabharata,” an individual’s every act has consequences that must be reckoned with; indeed, the individual’s every experience is ultimately weighed and defined in terms of religious belief.

Brook, his co-writers Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne, cinematographer William Lubtchansky and production and costume designer Chloe Obolensky have performed miracles on a modest $6.5-million budget.

Although shot entirely in a studio outside Paris, the film unfolds largely against rugged exteriors, but there is a key interior, a kind of all-purpose temple, lit by the flames of rows of burnished brass lamps. Brook and his collaborators, who include five composers, have stylized traditional Indian motifs in their work to create a more universal quality to the poetic epic, which in turn is reflected in Brook’s great multiracial, multinational acting company, the Paris-based International Center of Theater Research (CICT).

As the reflective Kunti with her proud, direct gaze, Goldschmidt is perhaps the film’s most commanding among many strong, sharply defined presences. The two most familiar members of the cast are Polish actor Andrzej Seweryn,a veteran of Andrzej Wajda films, who plays Kunti’s heroic son Yudhishthira, and Vittorio Mezzogiorno, who plays Kunti’s warrior son Arjuna and who is best known as one of Francesco Rosi’s “Three Brothers.”

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For all the theatricality of its acting and its various tableaux, “The Mahabharata” (Times-rated Mature for complexity and length) is a work rich in visual imagery--a real movie.

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