Sex,Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll
Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D is not a film.
Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D is not a film.
It is a film that may well earn no moolah at the Box-office but still go down as a remarkable achievement in Indian film history. After a spate of start and stutter projects (Paanch, Black Friday), Anurag Kashyap's Dev.D shows how its possible to make genuinely liberating cinema by simply stretching the realms of our so-called Indian tradition and venerable literature.
Dev.D is high anarchy under the strobe lights-in that it takes Shorot Chondro’s self pitying, weak, emotionally unstable Devdas and turns him into a horny, psychedelic, cocaine snorting Dev-grass of sorts who doesn’t have to die to disapprove of the evils of over-indulgence.
When a noun assumes abjectorial connotations-legends are born. Shorot Chondro’s Devdas is one such cursed character that keeps re-incarnating itself every few years, just to remind us what being a spoilt rotten Bhadrolok meant during the turn of the 19th century. Hence the phrase- ‘Devdas mat ban’. Its a line reserved for every whiny lover-boy who has ever wallowed longer in the inevitability of lost love than his machismo would allow him to.
So when dealing with Devdas, the overall storyline and setting is irrelevant prima-facie. But characterization in those very settings and plot treatment is of utmost importance. As is narrative voice and filming technique.
Kya naya hai picture mein?
Does anyone who’s going to watch Dev.D really care what happens to the alcoholic loser this time around?
It’s a done to death theme. The last time we met him, this dude had the choice of Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit but still ended up convulsing to death in a frilly dhoti.
What a pity.
Hindi cinema’s enfant terrible Anurag Kashyap pulls Devdas’ veneer of decency off, garbs him in jeans/T shirt/Dark glasses, pumps him with LSD and lets his testesterone loose on every the girl that he comes across in his neighbourhood, family circles and even the loneliness of the dark and dingy drug joints of Pahargunj in Delhi. Though Anurag Kashyap stays faithful to the overall theme of Devdas and even makes it a point to include a Chunni Lal drinking buddy, the salute to Danny Boyle in the opening credits should give the audience of what’s to be expected.
Dev.D is replete with social indiscretions like digressions into the ills of electronic communication, paid-phone sex, leaked MMS scandals, BDSM behaviour, BMW car crashes and totally guiltless exchange of body fluids. In fact, Devdas’ hitherto chaste pining for both Paro and Chadramukhi is successfully subverted to nothing less or more than just lust. The audience who still remember Sanjay Raam-Leela Bhansali’s version cannot be blamed for wondering-OMG, did bengali men ever have libido?
Does anyone who’s going to watch Dev.D really care what happens to the alcoholic loser this time around?
It’s a done to death theme. The last time we met him, this dude had the choice of Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit but still ended up convulsing to death in a frilly dhoti.
What a pity.
Hindi cinema’s enfant terrible Anurag Kashyap pulls Devdas’ veneer of decency off, garbs him in jeans/T shirt/Dark glasses, pumps him with LSD and lets his testesterone loose on every the girl that he comes across in his neighbourhood, family circles and even the loneliness of the dark and dingy drug joints of Pahargunj in Delhi. Though Anurag Kashyap stays faithful to the overall theme of Devdas and even makes it a point to include a Chunni Lal drinking buddy, the salute to Danny Boyle in the opening credits should give the audience of what’s to be expected.
Dev.D is replete with social indiscretions like digressions into the ills of electronic communication, paid-phone sex, leaked MMS scandals, BDSM behaviour, BMW car crashes and totally guiltless exchange of body fluids. In fact, Devdas’ hitherto chaste pining for both Paro and Chadramukhi is successfully subverted to nothing less or more than just lust. The audience who still remember Sanjay Raam-Leela Bhansali’s version cannot be blamed for wondering-OMG, did bengali men ever have libido?
Maybe not-but AK’s Dev.D is punjabi, so there you go.
After all that, is it any wonder that the film’s got every puritan’s proverbial goat?
So then, with all its in your face sedition, is the film deliberately disrespectful, immoral and insulting to women?
So then, with all its in your face sedition, is the film deliberately disrespectful, immoral and insulting to women?
Not in the least. Dev.D’s Paro and Chanda are wonderfully characterized as women with personalities that offer alternating crutches to his spineless existence. They are women whose lives are not devastated either by romantic rejection or the loss of their treasured hymens. There is no revel / reprimand cycle that underscores their actions or rules their lives. Their characters are so brilliantly sketched out –that for once they appear as real people and not the Ghore-Baire dichotomy that the Paro/Chadramukhi parable has been granted vis-à-vis Devdas’ relationship with the other sex.
Casting coup- Though Anurag Kashyap is the first person to credit Abhay Deol with the idea of a post-modern Devdas, the credit of moulding Devdas into a gentlemanly, Gen X prince of perversion goes to AK himself. Eventually, Dev.D stops wallowing in self pity and plunging his face into icy blue wash basins to realises that he can never, ever love anybody. This is the coup-de-grace of the movie. He learns to let go of his inability to be involved in true love and moves on. Mahie Gill (Paro ) and Kalki Koechlin (Chanda), who were both picked out of total obscurity for this film, suit their characters even more than Dev.D and deliver performances that would put last year’s Filmfare award winner(Priyanka Chopra) right in the…gutter. The scene where Paro returns from the sugarcane field with a mattress on her back and tears in her eyes does more to define her personality than anything else.Ditto for the scene where Chanda casually slips into a conversation on the semantics of her profession. If these scenes aren’t life defining moments for the Hindi film heroine-what is?
Music- If Aamir was anything to go by, Bollywood should have expected a Dev.D coming from music director Amit Trivedi. In this film, he crosses and mixes genres like a true master and comes up with a uniquely refreshing hybrid sound that’s difficult to pin down-much like Dev.D’s libido. The official audio release of Dev.D has 18 songs on its soundtrack. Yes there are18 numbers, all of which aren’t songs as such but musical pieces that form the backbone of Dev.D. Be it the folky Dhol Yaara Dhol/ the super cheesy-spoofy Emotional Atyachaar/the grungy~new age rock Nayan Tarse/or the trancy Paayaliya, Amit Trivedi shows A R Rahman and Shankar/Loy/Ehshan what being different actually means. His daringly original musical arrangements (like a brass band for a rock song) and the usage of previously unheard of voices is highly commendable. After 2007’s METRO-Dev.D is the next truly rock based musical score that scores. In fact, the whole album has Rock written over it in such big letters that you have to be Javed (Rock On) Akhtar to not notice it. The effect of the songs and background score is such that in hindsight, the whole Film appears to be a psychedelic dream sequence based around the stupendous soundtrack.
Cinematography- Like Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye-Lucky,Lucky- Oye, Anurag Kashyap shoots the first half of Dev.D in the garish, real colours of rural Punjab (without any artificial lighting). Then, when the story moves to the underbelly of Delhi, the usage of strongly contrasted, surreal lighting and zippy camerawork ~( especially in the song sequences ) is nothing short of stunning. Notably, the camera does not resort to the meaningless quick cuts/ zooming / gimmickry that Sanjay white-feather Gupta keeps resorting to but still delivers special Fx that wow you without taking your attention away from the characters. The squiggly neon lights that keep haunting a zonked Dev.D like an unholy Halo and his unsteady in/out of sanity movements truly are a joy to behold. My more learned friends tell me that the overall look/feel is close to Wong Kar-Wai his Chungking Express. I only found some stills online-but the analogy seems fair enough. ;-)
Screenplay- The film is told from three linear, discrete POVs. Paro. Chanda. Dev.D.- that are inconsistent in their weightage of screen time distribution but engaging all the same. After their initial lovers’ spat, Paro and Dev.D are mostly missing from Chanda’s descent from the life of a cocky convent school girl to the inescapable existence as a brazen street prostitute. The Paro portion of the film is clearly the best in terms of defining the characters and the Dev.D part suffers from a bit of excess-especially when Dev.D moves away from Chanda’s life and decides to do some back/pack soul searching ~ where ever the roads may lead him to. The trip may have been necessary to complete the character arc and bring him around to getting over himself-but the film certainly slackens that little bit in the third act. Apart from that, the screenplay (in English, Hindi and Punjabi) does well to liberate Dev.D from every other film that’s been made on the same theme.
Direction- Unlike No Smoking, where he was accused of being too obtuse for Indian audiences, AK makes it a point to keep Dev.D’s characters as humane as possible without compromising on his bigger statements on pseudo morality and crippling social mores. In the end, Dev.D is loads of fun (with references galore to SRK’s Devdas) but is still executed with amazing maturity and existential insight. AK makes it a point to pay his tributes but still dance with the devil while he’s tipping his hat and spinning on the dance floor. It’s a helluva romp to be able to pull through successfully, especially in the light of the baggage attached to its precedents and the dark clouds of doubt that were hanging over AK’s head after Paanch, Black Friday and No Smoking.
Casting coup- Though Anurag Kashyap is the first person to credit Abhay Deol with the idea of a post-modern Devdas, the credit of moulding Devdas into a gentlemanly, Gen X prince of perversion goes to AK himself. Eventually, Dev.D stops wallowing in self pity and plunging his face into icy blue wash basins to realises that he can never, ever love anybody. This is the coup-de-grace of the movie. He learns to let go of his inability to be involved in true love and moves on. Mahie Gill (Paro ) and Kalki Koechlin (Chanda), who were both picked out of total obscurity for this film, suit their characters even more than Dev.D and deliver performances that would put last year’s Filmfare award winner(Priyanka Chopra) right in the…gutter. The scene where Paro returns from the sugarcane field with a mattress on her back and tears in her eyes does more to define her personality than anything else.Ditto for the scene where Chanda casually slips into a conversation on the semantics of her profession. If these scenes aren’t life defining moments for the Hindi film heroine-what is?
Music- If Aamir was anything to go by, Bollywood should have expected a Dev.D coming from music director Amit Trivedi. In this film, he crosses and mixes genres like a true master and comes up with a uniquely refreshing hybrid sound that’s difficult to pin down-much like Dev.D’s libido. The official audio release of Dev.D has 18 songs on its soundtrack. Yes there are18 numbers, all of which aren’t songs as such but musical pieces that form the backbone of Dev.D. Be it the folky Dhol Yaara Dhol/ the super cheesy-spoofy Emotional Atyachaar/the grungy~new age rock Nayan Tarse/or the trancy Paayaliya, Amit Trivedi shows A R Rahman and Shankar/Loy/Ehshan what being different actually means. His daringly original musical arrangements (like a brass band for a rock song) and the usage of previously unheard of voices is highly commendable. After 2007’s METRO-Dev.D is the next truly rock based musical score that scores. In fact, the whole album has Rock written over it in such big letters that you have to be Javed (Rock On) Akhtar to not notice it. The effect of the songs and background score is such that in hindsight, the whole Film appears to be a psychedelic dream sequence based around the stupendous soundtrack.
Cinematography- Like Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye-Lucky,Lucky- Oye, Anurag Kashyap shoots the first half of Dev.D in the garish, real colours of rural Punjab (without any artificial lighting). Then, when the story moves to the underbelly of Delhi, the usage of strongly contrasted, surreal lighting and zippy camerawork ~( especially in the song sequences ) is nothing short of stunning. Notably, the camera does not resort to the meaningless quick cuts/ zooming / gimmickry that Sanjay white-feather Gupta keeps resorting to but still delivers special Fx that wow you without taking your attention away from the characters. The squiggly neon lights that keep haunting a zonked Dev.D like an unholy Halo and his unsteady in/out of sanity movements truly are a joy to behold. My more learned friends tell me that the overall look/feel is close to Wong Kar-Wai his Chungking Express. I only found some stills online-but the analogy seems fair enough. ;-)
Screenplay- The film is told from three linear, discrete POVs. Paro. Chanda. Dev.D.- that are inconsistent in their weightage of screen time distribution but engaging all the same. After their initial lovers’ spat, Paro and Dev.D are mostly missing from Chanda’s descent from the life of a cocky convent school girl to the inescapable existence as a brazen street prostitute. The Paro portion of the film is clearly the best in terms of defining the characters and the Dev.D part suffers from a bit of excess-especially when Dev.D moves away from Chanda’s life and decides to do some back/pack soul searching ~ where ever the roads may lead him to. The trip may have been necessary to complete the character arc and bring him around to getting over himself-but the film certainly slackens that little bit in the third act. Apart from that, the screenplay (in English, Hindi and Punjabi) does well to liberate Dev.D from every other film that’s been made on the same theme.
Direction- Unlike No Smoking, where he was accused of being too obtuse for Indian audiences, AK makes it a point to keep Dev.D’s characters as humane as possible without compromising on his bigger statements on pseudo morality and crippling social mores. In the end, Dev.D is loads of fun (with references galore to SRK’s Devdas) but is still executed with amazing maturity and existential insight. AK makes it a point to pay his tributes but still dance with the devil while he’s tipping his hat and spinning on the dance floor. It’s a helluva romp to be able to pull through successfully, especially in the light of the baggage attached to its precedents and the dark clouds of doubt that were hanging over AK’s head after Paanch, Black Friday and No Smoking.
Dev. D’s other interesting bits and pieces-
Nugget one- The Twilight Players are the trio that breaks into groovy open-hand dances under frosty blue neon lights of an underground drug joint in Delhi. As Dev.D sinks deeper into his hallucinations, they reappear with their gravity-defying gyrations in the songs Nayan tarse and Pardesi, lending the moments their psychedelic stupor. These super smooth guys are a group of three brothers from London, who are currently visiting their ancestral home in Phagwara, Punjab, and basking in the success of Dev.D. Christened Gurpal Singh Phgura, Amrik Singh Phgura and Sukjeevan Singh Phgura, the three now prefer their “trade” names — Sinbad, Ammo and Jimmy. A smart move given that their clients are often some big international names—they’ve performed with Michael Jackson, Madonna and Kylie Minogue. “Our style is inspired by a number of dance forms and is always about attitude, never just dance,” says Sinbad, 42, the oldest, in a heavy Brit-American accent.
Nugget two-When she takes refuge at her Grandmother’s place, Chanda keeps reading a book called Contempt by Alberto Moravia. The namesake movie is an all time art-house classic and the overriding themes of the Italian author’s books being-Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life, and the substantial incapability of people finding happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage.(source Wikipedia)
Watch it and you may discover more!
This is really good writing. Have not seen the movie yet but this sort of opinion makes it a compelling movie to catch. Hope you are able to post atleast a review every week.
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