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Very rarely do I get to watch a Hindi film that makes me shake off my habitual torpor, sit up and say: gosh, there’s hope for Bollywood yet! Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009) was one such rare treat. This happened last when I watched Welcome to Sajjanpur (Shyam Benegal, 2008) and No Smoking (Anurag Kashyap, 2007).  Both of those films gladdened my heart and restored my irresolute faith in Hindi cinema.

      However, Dev. D is special for many many reasons. First and foremost, if you were even half as appalled as I was by Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s garish, gargantuan Devdas (2002), you will have no trouble understanding my exhilaration for this new telling of Sarat Chandra’s maudlin melodrama. With whip-like precision, Kashyap delves into the very heart of the novel and distills it not as text or character—but as an adjective. He says as much, very clearly, in all his interviews. In other words, Devdas has become a way describing someone, a way of being, a life-style of male wallowing and consumptive degeneration that is responsible for creating the enduring archetype. (How many times have we told old flames: oh puhleeze, stop pulling a Devdas on me?) In cinema Promothesh Barua, Dilip Saab, Amitabh Bachchan and SRK (may I drop dead for putting those names in the same sentence!) have all languished in alcohol-induced stupors over lost love and irredeemable mistakes. Enter Abhay Deol—Devender Singh Dhillon—the eponymous Dev. D of the film’s title. Deol plays the part with verve, gumption and almost total detachment. Kudos! We’re all so tired of character psychology! Let’s leave 19th century imperatives like character depth to Hollywood.
      The plot is similar in part to the novel and is by no means the most important aspect of the film. Kashyap retains the bare skeleton of Sarat Chandra’s story but fleshes it out very differently. Most visibly, the story moves from 19th century Bengal to contemporary rural Punjab and bustling Paharganj in Delhi. For a native speaker/reader of Bangla, I will confess that this North-Indianization did cause me some initial trepidation. Remember, the blue and gold columns in Bhansali’s version, yikes? But as soon as I started watching Dev. D, I knew my faith in Anurag Kashyap’s prowess as a filmmaker is not unfounded. Yes, this too is a garish, loud, Punjabi version of the tale, but oh how different and how delightful! A point of interest: the irresolvable clash between the feudal and the modern that had caused the earlier avatars of Devdas so much anguish is completely done away with. This Dev has an indulgent, dithering, ineffectual patriarch as a father—a dying sugar-baron who responds eagerly and with affection to his son’s regular tantrums. Dev emerges as a spoiled, insecure, self-indulgent, often-insensitive jerk—are you listening Chattopadhyay-Babu? We may feel mildly sympathetic towards his plight, but woohoo, finally, we no longer have to feel gut-wrenching sadness for this pathetic, self-absorbed excuse for an adult!
      Technical and stylistic qualities of the film are breathtaking. The settings—both Punjab and Pahargunj are rendered at once spectacular and dystopic. (Will someone ask Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar to please pay attention to what spaces can be made to look like on film? Yes, even when you’re not trying to be ‘realistic’?) The music is lush and fabulous even beyond the catchy “emosanal atyachar” number. The editing is stylish, flashy, absolutely suited to the project. Dev D. is above all a film of atmosphere—from the suffocating confines of crowded homes in Punjab to the marijuana/cocaine induced Technicolor daze of nighttime Delhi, the expressive tenor of each space is perfectly captured. Oh, apart from incessantly smoking pot, swallowing suspicious looking pills and often snorting cocaine, this Dev likes his vodka punched with colas—either Thums Up or Pepsi. Not Coke, heheh. Details like these are to die for my friends; and I think we must give this beverage a try.
      Dev. D is Bollywood’s answer to postmodernism—campy, kitschy, glitzy and all about surface—surface of cities, of people, of relationships. It’s about surfaces in yet another crucial way—this is a film about bodies. It is gloriously, defiantly, corporeal. From Dev and Paro’s fumbled, abortive intimacies near the bathroom (at village and then the seedy hotel) to the unimaginable, barely-hinted-at delights of Chanda’s budoir—Dev. D emphatically addresses, elaborates, celebrates bawdy, bodily love. What a welcome hiatus from Devdas’s sexually repressed angst! It also celebrates the new sensuous, sensate world of attractions we inhabit—where communication is instant; where we’re denied the luxury of distance or delay. Kashyap calls it a world of “instant gratification”. So true for all the characters and events that animate the film.
      I could go on in this gushy vein for a while longer, but will take the high road and desist. One final word: the women, Paro (Mahie Gill) and Chanda (Kalki Koechlin) are astounding. My favourite scenes in the film include: Paro’s exhilarated dash to the fields with a mattress strapped to the back of her bike, the sequences of Chanda playing truant from school, and, later performing phone sex in various outlandish accents and fetishistic outfits. These women are alive, gutsy, ballsy and determined to survive in a hostile world. Remember SRK’s lecture to Madhuri’s Chandramukhi? “When a woman is neither a mother, a sister, a friend or a lover—she is a whore. What can you be Chandramukhi?” That kind of complacent reactionary crap is blessedly absent in Dev D. Here Chanda is a whore precisely because she is able to be all of the above—mother, sister, friend and lover. And Dev remains suitably impressed/grateful at the end. About time. Do watch the film peeps. Meanwhile, I’m rushing with open-arms towards Gulal.