Psychedelic Cinema is Finally here - NAYAN TARSE - to see more such Dev D's

"TALKIES" is the name on the hotel board sign as Singeetham Srinivaasa Rao's Puspak gets its credit card rolling - An amazing symbol of Irony - the film goes on to have nil dialogues. Anurag Kashyap seems to have taken a cue from this and has decorated the entire film of his with such super-symbolic hotel sign boards glowing relentlessly through the dark nights of Delhi. One of such boards is a class act - HOTEL GRAND is the place where CHANDA - the "commercial sex worker" carries out her night duty and Kashyap's cameraman cuts the G out to show us just the RAND part of it. Later DEV and CHANDA go on to laugh about how no one uses the word "randi" and its just "C.S.W" to describe people like her.

Filled with such deep allegories and some of the most psychedelic music hindi cinema has ever heard is DEV D - Conceptualised by Main man Abhay Deol (who in just a short time has become the poster boy of hindi parallel cinema and has given it a new lease of life) , written and directed by Anurag Kashyap. The film is so much like the picture above(on my blog). Its a brutally honest, beautifully self indulgent and stunningly different version of subash chandra chatopadhyaay's otherwise boring love saga - Devdas. And From what i have seen, this is the best adaptation of the book on screen so far. (vaazhve maayam starring kamal haasan and sridevi would come in at number 2).

The film is divided into three simple parts, each meant to go deep inside the mind of the three main characters - Paro Chanda and Dev - played very satisfactorily by a tantalizing Mahi Gill, a super-expressional kalki koechlin and a perfectly self-casted ABHAY DEOL.

PARO - The episode starts with anurag explaining literally what "being madly in love" is all about even as Dev asks Paro via phone whether she touches herselves or not and the 5 school girls sitting near me in PVR theatre in Forum at bangalore went ewww. Paro is madly in love with Dev and fate which incarnates through the local worker this time and later on through so many other people sees to it that they don't get together. Anurag's screenplay develops Paro's complex character in a fairly simple manner straight on your face - with a sequence of scenes showing that this girl can go to any extent to please and get the love of her life. Paro version 2 after dev rejects and insults her maintains the passion and tempo in blood flow. The scene where she meets the totally coke addicted, irritated by display light of the mobile- dev and cleans up his room is an emotional master cut. One more special scene in this episode is the STILL CAMERA sequence in the centre of the farm. (When dev rejects paro's advances and blow jobs)

illea(wht was that?)/CHANDA - Anurag at his imaginative best. He takes the 4 year old case of the DELHI PUBLIC SCHOOL, noida MMS and predicts what the girl would have gone through in the next ten years of her life.This is the film's best written and best enacted role. The anglo indian girl caought in a sex scandal devastated by dad's suicide and a families plan to murder her ultimately takes to prostitution and changes her name to guess what - madhuri's character in sanjay leela bhansali's devdas - yeah thats chanda for u and thats anurag at his best for u.A super positive and well reasoned out look at a prostitutes life. A prostitute who is so internally steady that she can be the perfectly motherly anchor to the desperately drug and vodka addicted life of our hero Dev. Anurag's spray's some nostalgia within nostalgia when he shows that the train Illea(before being named chanda) takes is the same one which PARminder (PARO) took to get the naked picture of her's scanned, so that she could mail it to dev - the dude from her id - chamma challo.

DEV - Self indulgence takes off from here. A solid twenty minutes dedicated to the mindset of a man who has had more vodka and more coke than one can ever imagine. The journey of a mind shown so fantastically through cars, bikes, underground dance shows , pukes, kicks and of course the deadly hit-and-run accident. A dev who remains neither Paro's nor Chanda's is too high to know what he is doing and runs over 7 people. (Another true incidence intelligently adapted). His once strict and later doting father dies and dev almost returns to normality before going on one more vodka filled tour with a dishonest punjabi driver. He is almost done in when in a shocking sequence he just escapes a similar drunken driving accident and realises that its chanda (no more a prostitue) whom he needs. A thankfully happy and peaceful ending to one of the most disturbed stories of all time.

There is still a lot more to write about Dev D. The music by amit trivedi deserves a special article in itself and the handling of the music on screen deserves another one too. :) But the who has the energy to write? I don't.

As a parting line "ishallreview" would advice its readers to NOT miss Dev D at any cost. Apart from treating you to an intensely honest attempt at movie making, DEV D will also make u feel HIGH for at least thirty minutes after you leave the cinema hall. (with no additional lung cancers involved)