Dev D. Another awesome flick from the maverick Anurag Kashyap. His cold documentation of the 1993 Bombay blasts in Black Friday made us wake up to non fictional filmmaking, his eccentric expression of our right to freedom of choice in No Smoking gave us our first tryst with Kafka.. but this motherfucker of a movie just takes the cake!!
This being from the same guy who cowrote Maqbool and Omkara, I had expected that the characters would only be loosely based on the earlier Devdas, with just the right amount of urbanization. But Dev D thrashed the alcoholic lover cum martyr into a sleazy self centred bastard.. it mutiliated the Bengali novel into a bloody mess of sex, drugs and Patna ke Presleys. Yes, this was ugly.. and that is why it was so beautiful. The pace of the movie smashed me right in the face and then slowly picked out my drying scabs. Emotional Atyachaar at its best. MMS scandals in a Delhi school, a rich kid on his BMW mowing down pavement dwellers.. the story was too close (to the world that surrounds me) for comfort.. and I haven't even spoken about the alcohol abuse yet.
As for the acting.. everyone was just brilliant. I've been a fan of Abhay Deol since his Socha Na Tha days. I can't see anyone else as Devendra Singh Dhillon. But the awe factor of this movie came in the form of the two leading ladies.. newcomers Mahi Gill and Kalki Koechlin. They stunned me with their portrayal of the new age Paro and Chandramukhi... vulnerable yet headstrong, crazy yet adorable. I'd definitely like to see more of them in the future.
I know this blog was not meant for movie reviews. But then again, so wasn't this movie.
