Masand's movie review: Dev D not for fainthearted

THE D COMPANY: It's one of those films that's likely to either dazzle you or drain you.

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Cast: 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.