Dev D – Hindi film romance has lost its virginity and now there’s no going back
Yes, the heading is sensational, but then Dev D too is a commercial movie! I am happy about that. I am happy that it is being received well…well enough to be called a ‘hit?’, which really should mean it has connected ‘emotionally’ with it’s intended audience using whatever means required…emotional build ups, music, of course a bit of intelligent marketing.
The reviews are all there, but I am reacting here to the ‘thought’ behind the film or at least what got communicated. We know the story already. The wasted rich boy and the two women in his life! But the script is refreshing.
‘Devdas’ in our popular culture has become eponymous with alcohol. Gladly, Dev D is not about ‘alcohol’. To me, it’s not about drugs either, but ‘addiction’ itself and the extremes sensitive people push themselves towards.
It’s kitsch (if I understand this term correctly) much like the experience of living in India – the many India’s that make this country and people who struggle to find themselves within the maze.
I’ve grown up on Hindi film romances. The beginning of Dev D transported me to that familiar territory – with it’s colour, music and the tug of emotion at the right place and time.
Paro
Our heroine, Paro, pushes the envelope with her action and reaction within her relationship with Dev. The writing is sensitive. She doesn’t become a vamp. She makes her choices and sticks to them, ‘very much the heroine.’ Or is she? She expresses her anger, she reacts and how!
Chanda
Chanda has a backstory and lives with her own reality and a totally different experience of sexuality in a different city – the rough, uncultured Delhi.
And then there is Dev himself – lost in Punjab, found in Delhi!
Dev
The tragic hero, educated and wasted, lost in his colourful abyss, falling deeper into it, until he is thrust out, pushed into the reality outside into the ‘systems’ that make society – either he can choose to remain in the nether world or if he has to live out of it, he needs a different life, a hand to support him – Chanda’s.
Dev D remains a romance, a fact underlined by the ‘happy ending’.
Realism, reality of emotion and Dev D
The film felt ‘real’ to me. There is realism in the images I see, of Punjab, Delhi. There is realistic detail in the spaces, characters – how they speak, react; realism of the kind that is once again making its presence felt strongly in our mainstream Hindi cinema these last couple of years.
Gladly, there is emotional reality as well. Paro and Dev in love is the most real romance of it’s kind seen in a contemporary Hindi film recently – a romance that seems true to it’s characters and openly addresses sexuality.
When the world shifts to Delhi, Chanda’s character takes us through a different emotional experience, quite different from the first.
With Chanda and Dev’s story, what I missed was seeing Chanda fall in love with Dev. She is there for him consistently, but perhaps it’s the film maker’s choice to allow the expression to be subtle or maybe her love towards Dev is overshadowed by Paro’s powerful persona.
Dev D is not trying to be ‘Requiem for a dream’, it has its own reality – one that addresses culture briefly, skims the surface of drug abuse and feels very ‘Indian’.
Indeed I am happy, that Dev D is accepted, but I am also sad – if the film has after all connected with its audience because of its ‘reality,’ then that’s a depressing fact.
The world of lust, drugs, mms scandals, fast cars that mow down people is after all a real one and in all of that ‘Dev D’ tries to find a suitable life to live. He has suffered the ‘bottle’ enough. Gladly now, the film maker wants him to move on … and why not.
(Ps. This is a first draft..there are chances I rewrite this piece, but wanted to share it now anyway)
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
MAKING OF DEV D -
Enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVXsNe_hCMs
wow,dev d is hailed as one of the greatest positive review films by critics.I am eagerly waiting a write up from anurag kashyap on this film..
smriti,there are several people still working in bollywood with stone age thinking.But this movie has done a quantum of leap in the direction of ethical and moral grounds of characters.
Dev D is a dark and underground India that is not depicted by our media,literature and movies.Our bollywood had fallen in the abyss completely till the end of 80s.Rise of new wave thinkers has been due to this non sense stuff given by bollywood in the name of cinema.The death of parallel cinema got unnoticed in mainstream.Anurag Kashyap is the leading torchbearer of new wave. The path of light and fresh air from bottomless pit lifts through dark phantoms of ocean.Kashyap is taking understanding of mainstream viewers of cinema in the direction of real characters rather than fake star culture.Hail ak
@Smriti.title of the post is dashing….
Aashish Shukla has done a great job of the making…..superb Aashish….superb.
and yeh there is no looking back…..
@Smriti, Satya Vachan. Ekdum Satya.
@Vasan, Which of the trumpeters?
when one does it (sex) for the first time its not always the best. you are nervous and self conscious. dev d is like that – very self conscious. like a mediocre orgasm. i cannot believe all the praise for the film. obviously people use a different yard stick while rating independent hindi cinema. for me, dev d is yet another failed hindi film. it did have many moments of brilliance. mahi gill and kalki koechlin are the finds of 2009.
It is sad what self obsession can do to an epic. Dev D is a burning example. A loose inspiration, if stretched to the string’s end can be something like a Raincoat. But Dev D is a raped epic at the end. The story is predominantly the same and some additions to it has just been the mms scam and probably the hopeful ending – which again I think has been crafted with the horror of No Smoking hitting the box office.
To correct Smriti, Dev was still all about alcohol. It was plain simple Vodka… Though on the contrary vodka is a step slower than desi towards cirrhosis, but it was the predilaction of DevD…
Even if this movie was presented as the director’s own humble interpretation of an epic, it could have been swallowed like the 7th pill of sorts… But being a blatant self proclaimed, egoistic statement where the story remains the same is called theft…
The scenes are nothing different from what World cinema has shown us already. I also agree that Freud’s ghost was also acknowledged – which I rather liked for romance is incomplete without that.
I probably had too much of an expectation from the movie but it stood as a copy in front of my eyes.
I wish Anurag watches the movie once more after reading the book, he would realise where he travelled on the same tracks laid by Sarat Chandra…
An inspiration is more than making a pimp more bling.
Ayan get over devdas.. it is not devdas..
Seriously Ayan…get over Devdas. It is not Devdas. I liked the film. The only gripe that I have Anurag is the ticket eating scene…why the lift off from Black rider?
And another question Ayan. Did you and Bhavani Aiyyar learn english from the same teacher?
(this comment has nothing to do with the post but since its written by smriti so i thought it’s the best place to complain)
dev.d hasn’t been released in allahabad(the city which has given india 5 prime ministers,harivansh rai bachchan and his son and umpteen number of artists-there are so many u’ll loose count)…..
i pursuaded my entire batch to see the movie, made electronics people bunk their lectures only to find out that they are not screening it(newspapers in this shithole aren’t updated well enough so i don’t trust them)….
i’m so pissed that i want to kill anurag or anyone who is resposible….
P.S.-my internet isn’t working these days otherwise would’ve complained earlier…
IMO DEV D was a good movie…but nothing like as it being hailed…..for me it does not have any repeat value…it’s like a shocker ,you don’t want that again and again.
Also I think PFC is going overboard with Dev D like all Anrag movies.
Ayan,
“But Dev D is a raped epic at the end. The story is predominantly the same ….”
Even the literary source ‘Devdas’ that has given this term to our popular culture is a ‘novella’ and not an ‘epic’. Please first check up what an epic means.
The story is not the same either. the end is totally different how can the story be the same!
ps: alcohol/vodka..i cared about the characters, i didnt even realise there was vodka until you mentioned it, maybe thats all you saw!
anurag kashyap – i LOVE u
DOES ANYONE HERE AGREE WITH MY VIEWS????
I found Dev D a very normal bollywood movie with good technical details. I mean nothing in the movie gave me goosebumps. There was no scene that broke my imagination in the way the scene was shot etc..
I don’t compare any movie scenes to other classics and try interpret the relation (like many others here do)while watching it.. Don’t give me any gyaan about world cinema because I’ve watched enough myself..The movie had some good performances (Abhay, Mahi etc)and the music..Apart from that, using the second heroine to speak tamil, french as she knows those languages or interpreting the nuances in the story..MMS, phone sex..I saw very less imagination and .I’m being brutally honest here…
I did not find this movie any special from ordinary rot I get to see every weekend in those multiplexes.
For the bar, I rate Maqbool atleast 5 times better than Dev D..
It’s a mediocre film. But made cleverly, pandering to our very Indian trait of wallowing in self pity. And such stylised self pity, stylised suffering, suffering in slow motion and fast motion, suffering with Ray Bans on, with electric music pounding in the background, how can any self-respecting pity junky resist these. I can empathize with the euphoria.
If No Smoking was wannabe-Lynch, this is wannabe-Wong Kar Wai. But I still think he is a talented artist, just needs to get out of this chronic I’ll-impress-the-hell-out-of-you mode and go hunt for the real thing.
DevD was good enough a film, quite honest and non-pseudo, unlike No Smoking. But PFC needs to move on: it’s quite on its way of becoming PFA.
@JS. “But PFC needs to move on:” well..these are my independent, individual views about this film especially being a north indian woman who grew up in delhi. you’re addressing my write up, i don’t represent all of “PFC”, how can i.
regds
smriti
Smriti,
The apt title of your reply would have been – epics, novellas, definitions and childish demeanours… It was my mistake that I thought we wree discussing something more than that… And Kaushik – Wow you have seen Black rider and you could see the rip off from one of its scenes!!! Watch the film again I am sure your count will go up…
Anurag,
Getting over Devdas is what I exactly wanted to do when I purchased the tickets to DevD… In the 1900’s when the story was first heard… it was completely belligerent towards the prevelant norms. Perfectly iconoclastic for the age… It spoke against addiction, it yelled at the purdah and stripped the weak male who sought shelter by creating the shield of dominance… When it is being relooked at in this era, I just expected it to go a few notches ahead… And ahead doesnt mean on to issues… But I meant more internal… The classic character who cannot take the right decision at the right time, one who cannot stand against his father because he doesnt know the divide between right and wrong, a perfect coward was an ideal reflection of the society in 1900s… But now in a digitised, globalised scenario, the tragic Devdas would be born different, his weaknesses would have evolved too…
The whole take on addiction is changed now… People are no more emotionally driven to addiction but often addictions drive the emotion…
And Paro too stayed the same, just a bit more vociferous because the era allows her to be…
Chandramukhi was well etched with the times. And thats what left me dissatisfied that some characters showed the timely evolution while others didnt (which hinted at convenience)…
The end didnt fit. Not because we are habituated to tragedies. But the simple fact that in the past 2 hours, you have tried all your methods to make me hate the cowardly Devdas and now in the last moment, you are expecting me to fall in love with him??
The character of Devdas in the mordern context could have been far more interesting. The eccentricity in his sadomasochism was completely missing…
I agree with a few comments posted here about Dev.D not living up to the mark for some.
I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the film. Rather, I was disappointed that I couldn’t love it enough to cut it for me. I honestly expected the film to stay with me. Instead it just left a lil voice in my head that went “Eh..?”.
I’m sure the explicit dialogues, the in your face sexuality and alike are being hailed as the dawn of a new chapter in Indian cinema, celluloid liberation or whatever but it just felt like the movie was being very cool and trying to be in tune with the generation now. And I’m not even over 25 yet. Sure it appealed to a lot of people who hooted and went “sahi hai!”, “hadh hai yaar!” at every such opportunity but somewhere, the emotional core of the film was lost for me. So much for ‘Emosanal Atyachar”.
I have seen this with Anurag Kashyap’s films. The style is great, some inspired, some original and fresh, yet it doesn’t touch an emotional chord inside. And that necessarily doesn’t mean that it has to have warm, fuzzy, sentimental content or a lump in your throat moments. The films just feel very “cold”.
The whole MMS sequence and its after math felt utterly amateurish, in its handling of the subject and in enactment as well. Something that could have either completely avoided or re-written.
Mahi Gill’s performance was quite commendable and her performance in the “ganney ke khet mein” sequence is a standout.
Dev.D – for all the pain and hurt that he apparently suffered (or rather inflicted on himself), those very emotions seemed rather superficial and just a means to show his addiction phase thereafter. Even that part, for reasons I can not articulate well enough, seemed lacking in honesty and a true portrayal of his suffering. Throughout the movie, despite some good photography, I mostly couldn’t connect to what was going on in Dev.D’s head. I think a major problem behind this was the relentless use of music. No doubt, its phenomenal, but if it doesn’t serve the purpose of the movie then it can get excessive. Quiet, restrained scenes can speak a lot for the character than lomo treated shots with great music but that end up looking like a glamorized music videos.
That brings to my mind “Climates”. Even though the premise is different, as an example of restrain and mature performance, its great. The film is filled with silence, yet those very scenes are so powerful and effective.
The updation of this old story seemed at a very superficial level. Online chats, downloads, pills, clubs, the language, the diction, the details, all brought the sense of the present to the story but the overall treatment of the story left me wanting. Like someone mentioned above how no shot gave him goosebumps, or someone else said the characters themselves didn’t feel updated enough besides the cosmetic updation. It didn’t hit me at the gut level. For some reason I expected a much darker Dev.D.
In the end it seemed like a series of some technically good shots, good ideas, a good concept, some good scenes, some bad ones, some good performances just strung together to form a noose loose enough to let me slip through. I was expecting to be choked and strangled and claustrophobed and to that effect exhilarated in the end but never before have I been so hugely disappointed with a movie. And I’m not writing this to belittle the filmmakers’ efforts or talents. Its just that my very faith and expectations in them left me utterly disappointed. Disappointed enough to classify as Emosanal Atyachar.
Looking forward to Gulaal though.