It’s official. Anurag Kashyap has finally come of age in the mind of the Indian Audiences. Don’t get me wrong, I think Black Friday was brilliant, but with Dev D he has got the formula right. It is old wine in a new bottle, but the bottle is beautiful.
It still makes me ponder how a drab sad story where the protagonist is a loser catches filmmakers’ fancy. Still, Anurag Kashyap’s effort is laudable, as it is a fresh and original take on the characters and the story.
Rooted in the real and the contemporary, Kashyap’s film stars Abhay Deol as Dev, an aimless 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 by setting it in the present, he 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, an embarrassed schoolgirl who becomes a prostitute after an MMS scandal. Dev hooks up with her 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. It’s the egos of Dev and Paro, and not solely the misunderstanding between the two that spell doom for their love. 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.
The film has some stellar performances. Whether casually rolling a joint first thing he wakes up or downing one shot after another in a dingy pub, Abhay brings charm and an underplayed angst to his young man gone astray. Mahie Gill does a courageous turn on Paro. Here again, credit goes to Anurag for taking a liberal approach to a woman’s sexual needs, but Mahie has balanced the lusty aspect of the girlfriend well with being a girl who’s emotionally vulnerable.
In the end, it’s one of the movies that you love or hate. It is an out and out Anurag Kashyap film, and the guy deserves some credit as it is really difficult to go out there, stick to your convictions and beliefs, and make a movie an out-of-the-ordinary movie. Let’s have an encore!
Poster source.
- Kaushik
2 Comments
2 March, 09 at 10:42 pm
Just passing by.Btw, youR website has great content!
31 March, 09 at 1:01 am
An okay film, nothing great about it.