Woke up one fine morning and did the first thing that I do each day - open up timesofindia.com. Scrolling down to bottom left, I saw that the review of Dev D was posted. I had high expectations from this movie, considering it was made by Anurag Kashyap and had Abhay Deol in it. I had just finished watching Oye Lucky Lucky Oye a few days back and was very impressed by the guy. So I click on the review and to my utter surprise, Dev D got 5 stars. The last time a movie got 5 stars in the Times was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This was 10 years back. I follow reviews by the Times religiously. They are very close to my taste. I especially like the fact that they are generous in their ratings, and, like me, appreciate the hard work that goes in making a movie. Even crappy run-of-the-mill movies get atleast 2 stars, unlike Rajeev Masand who is very mean. Anyways, after the review, Dev D was a movie that I was NOT gonna miss for anything in the world.
After waiting for about a month, I finally got a chance to watch the movie, and that too in a theatre. Was really excited.
Now for the review - long story short, the movie deserves 5 stars. Fantastic movie, brilliant acting, awesome music, and a happy ending! There is not a single thing more I could ask from a movie. The movie falls in the musical category with not less than 18 songs in it. But relax, they are not your typical song and dance routines. Instead they are playing in the background most of time time, and fit in really really well in the movie. My favorite song incidentally is Dhol Yaara Dhol, which is also very well picturised on the pretty Mahie Gill. Ok, coming to Mahie Gill - what a find! This woman can seriously act. She is very attractive, has good screen presence, and is confident. She oozes this raw sexuality without wearing any revealing clothes or mouthing explicit lines. Abhay Deol is turning out to be the poster-boy of alternative/multiplex cinema. The guy can act, likes to take risks, and does it all without seeming to have to try very hard. He plays the modern day Devdas better than anyone else could have. Kalki Koechlin does an awesome job as well. The movie is written to perfection. Looks trippy to perfection. It avoids cinematic pitfalls and shows perhaps the most honest version of Devdas so far. Some scenes that stand out are the ......ok I don't think I'm doing enough justice to how good this film really is. So here is a review that I really liked and says everything that the writer in me wanted to say -
I've always thought Devdas could only be told in black and white. For it is a bunch of flabbergastingly unidimensional characters -- drunkard, pining lover, courtesan -- that populate Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's essentially simplistic story, remarkable only for its wonderfully amoral, irredeemable titular protagonist.
Ushering colour into these monochromatic silhouettes has proved to be disastrous thus far, but Anurag Kashyap trailblazes in with a defiant new version that has only one aim, that to make your jaw drop.
Coolth drips from every frame, but we already knew this director as a man of extreme visual flair, and with trusted cinematographer Rajeev Ravi by his side, there was never any doubt that a film about a drugged-up Dev would look trippy beyond belief.
Kashyap's real surprise lies in the way he makes the story work, about how he avoids cinematic pitfalls and makes perhaps the most honest version of the character. In Dev D, Abhay Deol isn't charming like Dilip Kumar or melodramatically tragic like Shah Rukh Khan, but he is the character as he should be: the scumbag.
Nine minutes into Dev D, you realise that the director isn't aiming at an emotional connect with the hero, but instead trying to alienate you from him entirely. Gulping down that fact (with Thums Up or Coke, as you prefer) helps you kick back and revel in this utterly unconventional, marvellously immodest film.
Look, it's not as if you don't connect with any of them -- both the women traverse extreme character graphs -- but Dev himself is a wastrel you're really just meant to feel sorry for, and kinda sidle away from if he tries to borrow fifty bucks off you.
Enough such behind-the-obvious cleverness abounds in the film, and while there are many that might cringe at the film's three-hour running length, the best way to consume this long tall glass of cinema is by staying chilled. Dev D's real hero is responsible for this, and despite what the posters might tell you, that isn't Abhay Deol but the film's musicman, the astonishing Amit Trivedi who constantly juggles angst and allusion, profanity and pensiveness to make an awesomely heady cocktail that elevates the film itself to another level. The film's 18-song soundtrack is the narrative, really, bestowing the film with depth and nudging us, as viewers, in the right emotive direction even when the actors and lines themselves fail to get the job done. He's a master, this Trivedi, and the way Kashyap's used his songs is wonderfully appropriate, especially the rock version of Emotional Atyachaar.
Invariably sensory as the overall experience is, the film has its share of drawbacks. Stopping well short of revealing little scenes and details the joy of which should ideally be experienced first hand, I must wholeheartedly recommend you going to see this movie before pointing out its warts. Flaws hide in occasional lines, snatches of dialogue that seem forced, especially in a film that stays so close to the ground.
It's a stylistically arched world and not the one you and I live in, granted, but this is exactly why any deviation into filminess jars so painfully on the nerves. Let us not forget the film's Chanda, Kalki Koechlin and her strained dialogue delivery, responsible for the film's weakest moments, and even though she grows on you in the second half when bouncing off Abhay, she does let the film down.
Greatness in terms of character-building, however, lies in the delectably smarmy pimp, played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya, a man who hands Dev his drugs and literally carries him to the courtesan's fuchsia bed. Chunni, they call him, and the character is the coolest analogy the film draws alongside the original text.
Hubris dominates the overall proceedings -- remember, this is not a bad thing by default -- but while Kashyap excels when he's going all-out, there are sequences when he decides to slow down, to explain, to simplify. Evidently he gives the audience credit but not quite enough, and looking at his track record, it's easy to see why.
Even so, this is a rather radical project, a film that could well have done more but accomplishes far more than enough, and I think the only reason we expect even greater things is that it really, really whets our appetite.
Randomness happens often in our newly-experimental cinema, but it's always great to see a film where no detail is an accident, where the director gets to execute his vision exactly as he wants -- and this seems pretty darned close.
See Dev D once, get bombed, see it again.
Yes. I will see it again. Soon.
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