Click to play videoCast: Abhay Deol, Kalki Koechlin, Mahie Gill
Direction: Anurag Kashyap
Not every film is required to entertain its audience, but every film must engage its viewers.
Now that's a tall order when the film in question centers around the most boring, uni-dimensional character Indian literature could have possibly produced – the alcoholic, self-destructive romantic, Devdas. Add to that the fact that at least three Hindi films have already transported Devdas' tragic story to the screen.
Still, director Anurag Kashyap's Dev D, is a fresh, original take on the subject and the characters, but it's also a long and tiresome film that is not for the fainthearted.
Rooted in the real and the contemporary, Kashyap's film stars Abhay Deol as Dev, an aimless Benjamin Braddock-like drifter who returns home to Punjab after a graduation abroad, but has little in terms of future plans, except for getting into the sack with his childhood friend Paro, with whom he's spent many a long night talking dirty on the phone. On learning that she might have had a promiscuous past, Dev rejects Paro and her advances, driving her to marry a man she doesn't love, and landing himself in a downward spiral of booze and drugs and whores.
Kashyap takes the basic structure of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's original story, but in setting it in the now, updates much of the film's narrative, and makes the characters' actions and motivations more relatable. So you get a back-story to the Chanda character, the hooker Dev hooks up with in his desperate, despondent phase; and sex itself becomes the invisible but omnipresent motivation that drives many an important plot-point.
In its first forty odd minutes Dev D sucks you into its drama, shocking you with its brazenness, and more specifically with Kashyap's audacious re-imagination of the plot and its characters.
Take that scene in which Paro (played by newcomer Mahie Gill) sends for Dev to join her in a dense field so they can get down to doing what they've been unsuccessfully trying to do for some days. Watch the manner in which she virtually attacks a reluctant Dev into submission; and then the following scene in which she heads back home, mattress folded and tied on her cycle, after Dev spurns her overtures.
Watch also the fantastic song Yeh meri zindagi hai and the inventive manner in which Kashyap uses it to introduce Lenny (played by newcomer Kalki Koechlin), the character who goes on to become Chanda.
But from the moment Dev's descent into despair begins, the audience too plunges into what seems like a never-ending roller-coaster ride of loud clanging music, neon lights and head-spinning camera moves. Using music instead of dialogue is a unique and interesting narrative tool, but song-after-song-after-song-after-song your patience wears thin.
The film's second half is indulgent and repetitive to the point of being excessive, as it focuses much of its attention on Chanda; and let down by a disappointing performance and stilted dialogue delivery by Koechlin, it never really regains the momentum or the sheer bravura of its early parts.
In comparison to Koechlin, Mahie Gill makes a more assured debut as Paro, investing both vulnerability and a cocksure attitude into her character. But it's Abhay Deol who's the real scene-stealer, holding together the film with a fearless performance that is so rare to find.
Despite the clever new approach and its stylish telling, the flaw that hurts the film ultimately, is the fact that Devdas is never an engaging enough character and his story lacks soul. Speaking purely for myself, I was bored watching him repeatedly drown himself in drink and drugs. Self destruction is never an attractive quality.
I'm going with two out of five and an average rating for director Anurag Kashyap's Dev D. It's one of those films that's likely to either dazzle you or drain you. There is no middle option. Watch it, and decide for yourself.
Rating: 2 / 5 (Average)
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