I’ve never liked Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas. The eponymous ‘loser’, to me it’s success is a symbol of our voyeuristic fixation with an unheroic protagonist indulging in self-pity, pining for a lost love (lost, on account of his own cowardice), then drinking himself to death and collapsing at her doorstep after wallowing at the bosom of a prostitute. Both Paro and Chandramukhi were far more interesting characters in the book and in Bimal Roy’s cinematic interpretation (one wouldn’t want to get into Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘operatic’ but passionless Devdas at this point).
Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Deol (who’s credited with the concept for this film) have turned the Devdas story on its head and ripped the tragic mask off this character’s face, while giving the Hindi screen, and dare we add, Indian society too, a taste of kick-ass subversive cinema that’s sure to prove unsettling to many. Is it merely an accident that their Devdas is set in the same idyllic Punjab that’s Bollywood’s bastion of regressive values, where every Simran meekly bows down to the patriarchal order while Raj won’t take his bride without Bauji’s blessings even in the 21st century?
Here, Dev (Abhay Deol) who’s been sent away by his father to London as a teenager, talks sex on the phone with his beloved Paro (Maahi Gill) while she indulges his whim by sending him topless pictures of herself, instead of baulking at his suggestion. Neither of them is apologetic about their lusty obsession with one another. Paro’s bold enough to pin him down in the sugarcane fields and mock at his hypocrisy after he foolishly spurns her advances out of weak-minded suspicion (typical Indian male’s presumed ownership of his woman’s body). She speaks her mind, expresses her anger and marries a father of two young kids, but without regret. Instead, she breaks into a spontaneous dance at her own wedding, while the husband watches agape and Dev drinks himself silly over her ‘emotional atyachaar’.
He follows Paro to Delhi and is lured into a den of vice by Chunni the pimp. The Chanda (Kalki Koechlin) he meets here is nothing like Sarat Chandra’s noble prostitute. She’s a feisty half-Indian teenager from Delhi who got embroiled in an MMS scandal (half the country gleefully saw the video, while she was labelled the slut, she matter-of-factly informs Dev). Her father first watched the video and then committed suicide, presumably out of shame, and Leni (as she was formerly known) found herself in the shadowy streets of Delhi getting an education by day, and servicing clients by night. She isn’t ashamed of her chosen profession or bitter about life’s hard knocks. Unlike Dev, both Paro and Chanda have embraced their fate without much fuss.
In the film’s best scene, Paro visits Dev at the seedy hotel he lives in, gets him to clean himself up (washes his clothes as well) and leaves him with her candid opinion that he’s incapable of loving anyone because he’s too full of himself. Bravo! Hers is the best-etched character in the film, because it conveys so much with such economy, while the director lingers indulgently over Chanda, dragging the film down in the second half, only to redeem himself with a fitting denouement that finally liberates the Devdas metaphor from its misery.
Anurag’s unusual vision is backed by a tremendous musical score by Amit Trivedi (it’s outrageous, catchy and totally apt) and Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography that captures the rawness of Paro’s Punjab and Chanda’s surreal, psychedelic Delhi equally deftly. In the second half, the film is reminiscent of Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (isn’t the Nicholas Cage character the Hollywood version of Devdas in any case?). True to the source material, Abhay’s Dev is a shallow, self-centred idler happy to drown in a booze and drug induced haze. At no point do you warm up to this character and that's to Abhay's credit. He’s probably the only thinking actor one has seen in mainstream cinema in recent times, always astute in his choice of films, and eager to be moulded into different parts.
Anurag’s unusual vision is backed by a tremendous musical score by Amit Trivedi (it’s outrageous, catchy and totally apt) and Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography that captures the rawness of Paro’s Punjab and Chanda’s surreal, psychedelic Delhi equally deftly. In the second half, the film is reminiscent of Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (isn’t the Nicholas Cage character the Hollywood version of Devdas in any case?). True to the source material, Abhay’s Dev is a shallow, self-centred idler happy to drown in a booze and drug induced haze. At no point do you warm up to this character and that's to Abhay's credit. He’s probably the only thinking actor one has seen in mainstream cinema in recent times, always astute in his choice of films, and eager to be moulded into different parts.
Even more commendable is Anurag Kashyap’s journey. That he stood his ground even though his debut film, Paanch didn’t get released, Black Friday got horribly delayed, No Smoking bombed and faced unprecedented ridicule, to come back and make Dev D is a remarkable achievement. Whatever fate it meets at the box-office, this is a film that’s opened doors which Bollywood traditionalists will find very, very hard to shut.
That’s Dev D’s greatest triumph.
Deepa Deosthalee
3 comments:
Dev D - tu best hain (sic!)
The story teller (Kashyapy) tells us a distorted version of a narrative as his mind visualises the background to Devdas. Agreed its his movie and its his objective to tell the story as he sees it, but the sensibilities of lot of people would not agree to his presentation.
The frame where Paro goes cycling with a mattress to the field or the frame where she asks for the keys to the room from the native does arouse many a feminists being in charge. And then the frame where in the bus, Dev is listening to his Ipod and the girl next to him asks him if all he cares was about making out, the gentleman answers truly and also answers it for her but the feminists get the claps again. Was there any other relationship between them to warrant anything else is a question thought.
And they ate steaming momos and lived happily ever after!
Saratchandra's Devdas was an artist's reflection of urban colonial Calcutta crushing a virtuous Devdas into a Tragic end. Dev D is a film that works largely within an ultra modern India wrapped inside the emotion of 'Bibhatsa' or Disgust/ Horrific. This is one emotion that Indian performing arts and her cinema have consistently avoided. But somehow the events surrounding 'modern times' leave no choice to the artist but to express his or her complete frustration with their environ.
Tarrantino, Inarritu, Kim Ki Duk, Kitano are all part of this clan which express Dev Disgust in as many ways as possible. As you have rightly said this film is going to make a lot of viewers squirm in their seats but the problem I see here is that this new pathway does not have much of a distance. The works of Anurag's mentors are ensconced within a larger media of horror films, brute pornography, subversive political press, underground music clubs, gay/ lesbian rights movements etc as witnessed in Korea, Mexico and the USA. Unlike India, these nations are entirely urban and industrialized and we have very little of such 'underground' activities.
So where does Anurag go after leaving his viewers disgusted and squirming? Should an artist's work not connect even a bit emotionally with his viewers with some kind of a preferred viewpoint?
Unfortunately we belong to a tradition seeking some kind of redemption, however abstract it may be, in order to take a larger social/ societal narrative forward. And DEV D is a dead end, wallowing in the bloody vomit of its protagonist; its women characters sparkling unconventionally in the few scenes offered to them while Delhi goes about providing wads of notes through it's million ATM machines to an idiot whose only strength is the ability to consume bottles of vodka without setting himself on fire!
The only scene with which I personally connected was when towards the end of the film, the local bar owner punches Dev in his stomach and kicks him out of the bar! And I wanted to ask Anurag "Why was this guy not kicked out off the very first bar or brothel in which he makes a public nuisance of himself?" Or was this film Anurag's way of getting back at Mumbai which left him aimless for long periods of time?
In Chennai, this has only a small elite watching the film thanks to the 'wonderful' comments posted by Shobha De and her ilk! The film left me wondering whether I should join the elite to say 'Cheers'!
K. Hariharan
Chennai
Thanks sir, for your comments. As always, insightful and thought-provoking. I'm planning to watch Dev D again, and will probably reflect on your views while watching it.
However, off the cuff, the problems you've listed with Anurag's film are the inherent problems with the Devdas story. I've read Sarat Chandra's book and read it carefully, although not recently. Have also watched Bimal Roy's version a few times. When you say "its an artist's reflection of urban colonial Calcutta crushing a virtuous Devdas into a tragic end", I don't agree. The reason I never felt the man was heroic was because he just didn't have any redeeming qualities. He was arrogant, indecisive, cowardly, and eventually weak-minded enough to drink his life away. He was a zamindar's spoilt son who didn't have to be accountable to anyone for anything he did or didn't do, never did a day's work, always depended on others for financial and emotional support. He visited brothels, drank himself silly, pined for the woman he'd himself spurned, and basically couldn't deal with his own failure. Which is exactly why I've never understood our filmmakers' obsession with this character. What's likeable, heroic, or 'cathartic' about the Devdas story? Why is the man who becomes an alcoholic and dies at his much married lover's doorstep worthy of redemption?
The basic premise of Anurag's Devdas is no better or worse than the original one. Yes, he is the spoilt son of a rich zamindar. He is sent off to London because he's a nuisance to the father. He comes back and tries to reclaim the girl he loves, but isn't man enough to accept that she has a mind of her own and is entitled to make whatever choices she likes. He rejects her for a different reason, but it's also born of his inherent weakness of character. He comes to Delhi and blows away his father's money on drink, drugs and brothels.
The ambience may seem horrific because we've been given far more sanitised versions of the same story in the past. But the import is exactly the same. In fact, the reason Anurag actually liberates the Devdas character from its misery is because he gives him a chance at redemption. When the bar owner punches Dev and throws him out, and the car almost crashes into him, he finally wakes up from his miserable nightmare and decides to take the first really positive, assertive step of his entire adult life, by going back to Chanda and turning himself in to the police.
Yes, we don't have a culture of watching 'horrific' cinema, which is perhaps why there was such outrage about Slumdog Millionaire (my contention though is that it's simply a mediocre film). But I also think that experimentation and pushing the limits of expression are essential for the growth of any cinema.
It is my contention that our cinema is as hypocritical as our society itself. What we don't show on screen therefore, doesn't exist. Which, we all know, isn't true.
Warm regards,
Deepa
Post a Comment