Shorter Can Also Be Very Good : One-third the length of the celebrated stage presentation, Peter Brook’s film of ‘The Mahabharata’ is a revelation

Cinema has a poetry that makes it possible to be realistic and artificial at the same time--that’s what I was looking for . . . how to be realistic and minimalist is what put me in the studio . . . .

--Director Peter Brook “Honey, I Shrunk the Play” might be a catchy subtitle for Peter Brook’s film of “The Mahabharata.” Flippancy aside, it is precisely what Brook has done, condensing his epic nine-hour stage version of the 100,000-stanza Sanskrit poem to a stylized three hours of screen time.

How does “The Mahabharata” work as a film? Impressively. OK, let’s come right out and say it: Better in many ways.

This is the faintly disloyal reaction of a theatergoer who sat through the Zen rigors of “The Mahabharata’s” stage incarnations twice: once in French, at Brook’s claustrophobic Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where one realistically breathed the dust of the battle scenes and eyed with alarm the closeness of numerous oxygen-consuming fires on stage--and once in English, in the air-conditioned vastness of a Raleigh Studios sound stage during the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, where it seemed entirely too remote.

It is also the response of someone who had always suspected that Brook could have put the “Mahabharata’s” message across on stage just as effectively in seven hours as in nine, and for whom the real shock is to have fallen so far short of the mark. At a taut and unhurried three hours, the movie’s sheer density is the result of heady distillation, its impact exponentially strengthened and purified as if magically squared by the fewer number of hours it takes to get through it.

If this isn’t exactly new math, it is uncommon artistic redaction. “The Mahabharata,” after all, is the Greatest Story Ever Told in something other than a Judeo-Christian context. It is a dazzling philosophical fable, whose aphoristic parables and proverbs are its beating heart. The very word Mahabharata loosely translates as “The Story of Mankind,” and the exploits and events that unfold in it touch on every aspect of human behavior.

It is a tale of good and evil, of the co-existence of the good Pandavas and the bad Kauravas perceived as both sides of the human condition, since these are neo-cousins descended of two brothers: the blind King Dhritharashtra (father of the malcontent and bellicose Kauravas) and his sibling King Pandu. Pandu’s sons, however, are not strictly speaking his. Because of a curse placed on him early on, they are the offspring of his flesh-and-blood wife in a series of unions with benevolent gods. The double implication is that the inability to see (read understand ) gives rise to cataclysmic angers, and that no earthly child can be good who is not brushed with some divinity.

In India, there are those who believe “The Mahabharata” to be a true story of a terrible conflict dating back thousands of years, those who consider it simply a magnificent fairy tale, and those who see it as an illustrated prescription for the proper conduct of one’s life.

Brook himself chooses to treat it as a glorious myth. He makes no pretense at Indian authenticity. His “Mahabharata” is, he said, “refracted” through the sensibilities of his multinational company. It is an India shaped by non-Indians, flavored and designed for non-Indians, dressed up in Indian colors and paraphernalia and filled with haunting neo-Indian chants played on real Indian instruments. Ersatz to the purist, but certainly Indian in essence , which is what Brook wanted to achieve.

A story with so many tangential and not-so-tangential asides, plots within plots, lessons within lessons that illuminate behavior, demands plenty of engagement. It requires not only that we listen and watch, but see and hear. Film makes us do that better. The overwhelming virtue of Jean-Claude Carriere’s play script was its lucidity. When Brook translated it from French into English, a more ascetic language, its spareness was enhanced. In the film script, where every word counts three times as much, it is even leaner. “The Mahabharata” on film implodes like a black hole.

Brook, who has said that “the great invention of the cinema is the close-up,” pretty much debunks the already discredited notion that film demands that a play be “opened up.” The close-up is a tool the theater does not possess. “The Mahabharata’s” charged spiritual and philosophical content cries not for the outward trappings of spectacle on film but for a single-minded austerity: the camera’s inward eye, zeroing in on a thought or emotion with the tenacity of a steel trap. Brook uses it with impunity.

Instead of widening his lens, he narrows it, forcing us to

focus on essentials. This reduction to underscore effect is a fascinating phenomenon. Even though he has only made 10 films, Brook has acknowledged his passion for the medium. “In the theater, an image can’t invade your mind,” he told a reporter. “The great quality of the theater is that you are involved and free. The cinema is hypnotic and, in a way, brainwashing.”

Or simply manipulative. In this case, ideally so. Beyond the poem itself and the way Brook plays with shadow and surface and magnified faces, there remains an old bone of contention: the voices. Brook has been loyal to most of the same actors who were in the play (most of them from his Center for International Theatre Research in Paris) and has used them in the film. But these players are an ambulatory Tower of Babel representing 36 nations, 35 of which, on the evidence, are presumably non-English speaking.

Having this magnificent text rendered in tortured, if not fractured, speech (English or French) is an arguable choice that Brook has always defended. At least the technological refinements of dubbing and amplification make listening to it on film less arduous than listening to it on stage. One could even go a step further and make a case for the extra attention one is forced to pay to untangle some of the words. In a funny way, the combination of deliberate pacing and labored speech play into the director’s hand. Each exchange must be so carefully delivered that it gives the appearance of having been conceived from some center of deep, primordial thought.

This heightens impact, marshaling our attention in a way a play rarely can.

(The recent Mark Taper Forum production of Samuel Beckett’s “Eh, Joe,” a one-act initially written for television, was an interesting exception. It managed a potent effect by emulating film--projecting a close-up of the lone, silent actor’s face on a cubic screen center stage, which represented the room or cell or mind that confined him. Then the director amplified the only sound around: the whispered voice of the man’s tormentor--a woman he hears in his head. It worked.)

It is not the first time that this kind of implosion has enhanced a stage property that is transferred to the screen. Terry Hughes’ dynamic 1982 videotaping of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was another case of small being startlingly more beautiful--moodier, more intense, clearer in its delineation of tragedy.

The use of divided images for songs in many voices and the dissolving of one image into the next enriched the texture and sheer power of the work. Camera technique magnified and vivified a musical that, in its original run at the cavernous Uris Theatre on Broadway, had been all but engulfed by the wrong kind of empty space and, in a misguided attempt to reduce that cavity, dwarfed by a functionless, overpowering set.

The camera’s eye is a formidable presence. Like the “Mahabharata’s” gods, it programs our responses. We are compelled to see and hear whatever it dictates. It moves us through “The Mahabharata’s” hyper-reality as if through water, while the myth, pregnant with the ruthless sense of time’s eternity, doles out its premeditated wisdoms. It is mesmerizing.

When it comes to pitched battles, even the most rudimentary camera effects are easily more impressive than the theater’s stylized resourcefulness. On stage, for all of its carefully chosen symbolism (a wheel to represent a chariot, an arrow carried through the air to find its target), the grinding battle scenes of the third part, itself almost three hours long, seemed woefully repetitive and, at Les Bouffes, asphyxiating.

The film’s relative brevity is an asset. It doesn’t take much expertise to divine that this clash of juggernauts was shot on a sound stage (at Joinville Studios) for about 2 1/2 centimes. There’s not a single extra. Makeup and smoke screen a lot of budgetary shortcomings. “It is a trick of darkness we need,” says Krishna--or a trick of light. The entire film was made for something less than $6 million--or the cost of a fancy Broadway musical.

Arjuna’s failure of nerve at the point of battle triggers the most arresting scene of the “Mahabharata” movie. In it lies a quintessential message about war: “Victory and defeat, pleasure and pain are all the same. Act, but don’t reflect on the fruits of the act. Forget desire; seek detachment . . . You must rise up free from hope and throw yourself into battle.

“You must learn to see with the same eye a mound of earth and a heap of gold, a cow and a sage, a dog and the man who eats the dog.”

On stage this was a moment easily lost in the endless shuffle. On screen, the story halts and turns inward, while the god Vishna pours his wisdom into the anguished hero, giving him the chance to rally his strength before making his choices--and us the opportunity to experience the process with him.

That ability to pull us through its experience, to make us experience its fairly rarefied spiritual reaches, which was true of “Mahabharata”-the-play, is even truer of “Mahabharata”-the-film. It won’t be for all markets. But, “If you listen carefully,” says Vyasa, the author of the great poem, to an inquiring boy, “at the end, you’ll be someone else.” Enabling us to listen carefully so we can be changed is the film’s understated triumph.