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
