Dev D: reflections part 2: Chanda

Continuing from reflections part 1

…at this moment, the most satisfying of the 18 songs in the film (probably because the moment where it is placed; no visuals, only the song, play it and read…

1.

I am having a gala time discussing DevD with my closest friends. Probably have talked for a cumulative 24 hours at least. Yesterday saw it again in probably the widest screen in Kolkata; then we were there few of us friends, dazed and trippy like Rajeev Ravi’s visuals in the film. Appreciation of DevD is a good test of who exactly like-minded friends are.

And then got irritated reading reviews again. Convinced: add up even the 20 best reviews and you don’t get the film (I have linked the best two in the previous post). People are getting it utterly wrong, or latching to the least of the film’s achievements. Yes, even Khalid Mohammad got it wrong; no DevD is not only a jazzed-up, doped, sexed-up take on the Saratchandra novel. If it would had been so, so many hours of discussions wouldn’t have followed in my life. Yes, me and my friends are so goddamn serious about films that we hardly spend minutes about smart-ass contemporary cinemas.

I don’t consider Anurag Kashyap as a messiah down there to save Indian cinema. Instead, it might lead you to deadeningly blinded alleys if you follow his template because Kashyap is a cinematic freak. You cannot follow him because he pours himself entirely into his films and you have neither lived his life and nor dreaded his nightmares…you can’t repeat his successes.

Let the lesson be rather: learn how to pour yourself into your cinema.

But I will qualify myself further. DevD is not Anurag’s film only, if you watch it sincerely (now what’s that I cannot explain) you will know how a single film can turn out to be equally personal for Abhay Deol, Amit Trivedi and Rajeev Ravi too. Subtract any one of them and the film fails.

I am still not prepared to write adequately about the film. DevD is one of those rare films where the experience starts after the film ends. It gives you a template of emotions, now you live with your own DevD screened in your mind.

2.

I will write only about the Leni/Chanda character in this post. I ended with her in my earlier one…

This character is probably the most audacious addition by Kashyap. Another director would have obviously opted for Mahi Gill in the role of Chandramukhi; her zest, looks, strength and brazenness puts her straight into the lineage of Vyjayantimala, Rekha (yes, no one is listening to me! Mukaddar ka Sikandar was one of the best takes on Devdas; and who else but a young Amitabh Bachchan could have played our melancholic drunk best?), Madhuri Dixit etc (and oh yes…Tabu!). But also who else but without the freakish madness of Kashyap would have cast a fragile and french Kalki Koechlin in the role which is so well-etched in Indian minds?

I doubt if the sexual definition of the character was there in his mind. Since its not productive to read or guess another person’s mind can only try to jot down strange things going on in my mind.

Leni is a veritable child the film. Asked a friend in a hushed down voice: “Is this guy triggering the latent paedophile in us?” Dev’s character is at least 10 years senior than her in the film. Look at her in her school-dress when she is walking down the streets of her damnation. The first episode of the film was just rollicking fun for me. Kashyap never lets us identify with the scumbug that his main male protagonist is and Paro is too firebrand for us men. We can drool at her but hardly can match an eyeline. Then our Dev is in the classic fix: he suddenly discovers that the girl he has just spurned is looking devastatingly beautiful in her wedding-dress. Devdas hits the bottle. The film severely undercuts the moment by underlining it heavily with the irreverent ‘emosanal atyachar’. You don’t know whether to laugh or sigh. Paro doesn’t seem to regret the moment, she is having a great jig! I should thank Kashyap for doing away with the sick ‘branding-paro-with-a-cut-in-her-forehead’ thingie of the novel. Our Dev trips and passes out. The black screen announces the next chapter: Chanda.

The following shots shows a thin teenager and her cosmopolitan parents. We are not sure what to do with the bluish coldness of the shots. Then she starts walking down the streets and ‘Yahi Meri Zindagi’ starts in the soundtrack. Anyone who has listened to it knows how cruelly contrapuntal it is to her damnation which follows after her MMS sex-video scandal. The child is damned. Smudged in sin though still a flower of a virgin. Even her dad ‘downloaded and got off’ before eating his bullet.

This is the moment when I get emotionally hooked into the film, this is the moment when chuckles and guffaws gets silenced in the theater for long. If you are maudlin like me you will have tears in yours eyes when she is phoning her mom, you will get shit-scared when a relative growls about ‘honor killing’, you almost shriek under your breath “run, kid, run!’ when she walks out of her ancestral home, you will be numbed when she lands up in the brothel out of sheer hunger and you are dumbed when her folks in the brothel celebrates her school-final results. Then when the chapter ends with our hero’s drugged out body flopping in her bed  there she is, in her garish pink outlandish whore-costumes staring at her ’soul’s brother’ with expressions in her face which speaks more volumes than you can write down.

The descent to hell will begin, but Dev being Dev, will take a helluva lot of time to figure out that at least in this journey he has a friend, someone who speaks really less, snorts coke but never gets hooked and never makes it a concert saying that she is in love. She only says, even when she is hurt: “you are such a slut!’ with a twinkle hiding a tear-in-vain in her eyes. And she almost tells: “remain fallen and damned my brother, for as long as you remain so…you might…stay as my man”.

My point to drive home. DevD follows a trajectory of emotions which are not exactly conventionally curved. Dev’s final loop of doped helplessness needed an emotional trigger. But when Dev ‘fell’ we laughed at him. Later when he is falling down, we are not laughing any more. We have suddenly started feeling for him. For him? Not exactly ‘for’ him…rather for a ’state of being fallen’ which is rather independent of him, because instead of witnessing his fall we witness Leni/Chanda’s and it is effectively same…or…it is more. We laughed at sex in the first episode, we didn’t do so in the second. Suddenly, a truck of emotions triggered by her is carried forward by Dev in the final of the triad of chapters.

Those who thought that the film is all-and-only brashness-and-sleaze, like Khalid-’the pun’-Mohammad, has stopped feeling things any more or I am more beautiful. As he said in his review, the ending is a huge letdown because of it’s ’sweetness’. It is not; it is the inevitable. At least I wouldn’t remain engrossed for days if a film is only a gallery of smart irreverence for its own sake. DevD is gutsy because after damaging irreparably the Dev-Paro mystic it really shows us what love and emotions could have been like…of course not palatable like your standard Bollywood prescriptions.

My accolades to Kalki Koechlin.

Love you kid…(that’s for Chanda).

…and I will continue further.

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

Kalki Koechlin: Chanda in DevD

Dev D: reflections part I

2009 Hindi film directed by Anurag Kashyap

– Dev. D (2009)at IMDB,

– Dev. D – in Wikipedia,

– Dev D – Official Movie website

Couple of notable movie reviews from many:

– Dope and Glory

– The Tale of Two Different Halves

And all those articles tagged Dev.D at Passion for Cinema, which is almost unabashedly an Anurag Kasyap fansite, so you might take things with a pinch of salt.

First a disclaimer: this is not a review of the film. Dev.D is turning out to be a film which is triggering numerous reviews where the feel of the film is reproduced again and again through effusive words. This is a rare phenomenon in contemporary movie criticism, where a critical review almost turns out to be reliving of the viewing experience (and I have read almost 50 of them; Dev.D is triggering the best among writers). This can only rarely happen when a work of art manages to put forward something rare too: a zeitgeist. I am sure Anurag Kashyap’s next one, Gulaal (released this week) will intensify the high. Personally, I fear watching Gulaal (I deferred Dev.D for long), I might be overwhelmed. The effect is, in short, reeling: one cannot stay…normal.

I have another ill-maintained blog on films. A piece on Dev.D was supposed to be posted there. But those few of my kind readers who have followed this blog from its inception couple of years ago know that this article deserves a place here, in Love’s Ragpicker. To put it humbly, my posts and poems probably was putting forward something which finds such a happy echo in Kashyap’s film.

Curiously, the film leaves a different impact on me rather than the one I expected after reading those reviews and conversing with ecstatic friends. I expected a dark, sordid, brutally anarchic film which descends down the roads of perdition. Not that they are wrong, but Dev.D was a heart-warming experience to me. I immediately messaged a friend that it is a “fairy tale trip to me. I deliciously relished Dev’s debasement and his liberation”. No, I didn’t identify with the rich arrogant self-centered indecisive Punjabi brat Abhay Deol plays with such intense understatement (I like his jaws!). I identified with his predicament, with his state-of-being, with the haze into which he almost sleepwalks that is the landscape of Kashyap’s mind, the only living Hindi filmmaker who can paint a dystopic world with aplomb. And the journey was, again, curiously, heartwarming. The film deserved the sunlit landscapes in its final reels, not as a relief but as a poetic denouement.

The landscape of Kashyap’s mind. Years ago Kashyap came to Kolkata, at my workplace to talk about his No Smoking, something still more daredevil than his later films if not more effective. He played ‘Emosanal Atyachar’ to us and said that he is particularly not fond of Bengal/India’s existential icon, Devdas. There is a discernible trajectory in the depiction of K, the Kafkaesque protagonist of No Smoking. He flaunts his superbly sculpted body narcissistically in the beginning, ogling at himself now and then in the mirror. At the end he is there in the front of his mirror again, showing his invisible pinkie. His finger is cut-off, he isn’t that perfect again. Kashyap doesn’t particularly like his male protagonists. They are faulty, scarred, bruised, devilish (Kay Kay Menon in his unreleased Paanch, I did manage to see a bootleg) and seldom the one you can anchor yourself to. What is left is that landscape of the mind.

That’s so welcome in Kashyap’s films. He is thoroughly personal. Welcome all those artists who can wrench cinema back to a medium of personal expression. One knows how difficult it is in Indian Cinema. Dev.D goes beyond being a spoof of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s classic 1917 Bengali novel Devdas, though folks are ga ga about all those subversions he throws in the face of Hindi cinema. Hindi mainstream cinema, with its moribund juggernaut of ‘values’, sentiments, clichés, opinions and hypocrisies are just waiting, pants lowered well, to be subverted. Still told one of my friends that I am a bit wary about Dev.D, I am not particularly fond of spoofs. She said it is not.

Kashyap does subvert, and brutally so. He damages the myth of Dev-Paro ‘platonic love’ which the ilk like Sanjay Leela Bhansali has squeezed dry. The Dev-Paro romance is evacuated of all ‘emotional securities’. It is pure lust, it is lurid, it is so horny that you chuckle embarrassed seeing them misrecognising a fuck  for love. I know it hurts. But Kashyap hurts without demeaning Paro; rather Mahi Gill will be remembered as a firebrand who is too sure about herself. All that is left is a Dev with a face of a joker, with the bang of a bottle in his head. Well, the oedipal excuse for rebellion in the original novel – that it was his dad who opposed and nullified the marriage – is also taken way. He is responsible for his own act. No excuses.

So, no love left sublime to sublimate your sins, because you refuse to call your sins what it is: sin. Dev is not the sinner. He is just a man in hots and nothing more. We are sinners, because we supported inanities in cinema. Reduce a capitalist fiasco which leads to death of thousands in search of a promised land to a choco-sweet story of Jack and Rose: that’s a sin. Reduce a problem that is man-woman relations into archie-hallmarks cards: that’s a sin. Being virginally lyrical in the times of the novel is sin. When all is reduced to dust, you have one task left: to find love again. Dev.D does it. The ending has irked many; few critics have said that Kashyap surrenders to sweetness again. I differ here. Love here is the humble recognition that your lover slept/sleeps with others. You don’t own the woman; still something remains to be explored and shared. You are an outcast because you have forgot how to survive, she is a whore because she battled to survive (the gruesome scene where a relative was contemplating honor-killing); you are left with no sanctifying certificate that is marriage; when all is stripped off, let love begin. The classic ending of erstwhile Devdas’s: Paro running towards a dying Dev and the doors closing at her face, secures the male fantasy somehow akin to Satidaha, that you still own the woman’s soul when you are withering away to death (and the classic twist of course that Paro is still a virgin, her older husband doesn’t sleep with her). The erstwhile Paro is almost like a good hot bathtub foam to Indian men, you wash your dirt away in her disinfectant luminescence. Something cunningly referred in the last scene she appears in Dev.D: she cleans his room, saying again and again that he stenches, the room smells. But she refuses the final ‘cleaning’. “Are you pulling my leg?” Dev snaps; “I am showing you my guts”, repartees Paro. Kashyap is showing his guts, true; he is also saying that Hindi cinema is such a dirty linen it can hardly be cleaned with doses of antiseptic sentiments. Dev, in the penultimate scene, is being cleaned, but he has already accepted it. You need to accept your muck.

As I mentioned above, Kashyap’s protagonists are seldom images providing an anchor to identify. He provides us no safe refuges. Dev is probably the most deplorable specimen of men you see walking or biking down the streets of North Indian cities. Dumbed, numbed pounds of flesh with enough dough in their sacs to waste it away in indulgences. No, you might have expected it but there are no ‘60s countercultural excuses (there is Lennon in Gulaal) when Dev is reeling with vodka and ecstasy. It is – plain and simply – bad and debauched a behavior, not a rebellion.

But a rich brat wallowing in his self-pity is hardly anything new. Dev is uplifted from such a muck too. It is difficult to write how it is done; it is pure ‘emosanal’, not narrative, neither discursive. I cannot do it now. Probably it is only the cinematic which lifted me up in the final quarter of the film.

A famous scene in erstwhile Devdas is the drunk hero wallowing in garbage and Chanda lifting him up. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version referred to it verbally, couldn’t show it because in his vision of a clean and opulent Indian past (continuous to his present production values and gloss) garbage cannot feature. I was missing the scene in Kashyap’s. It finally arrived in a way, recall the scene with the dog, and where it is placed in the narrative is telling. It is where Dev arrives, not a place somewhere in the middle of the narrative. Those scenes after the running down of pavement-dwellers, bailed by a lawyer tellingly named Bimal Barua (Pramathesh Barua directed the 1935 version, and Bimal Roy the 1955 one, the two definitive ones), the heartrending yet choked cry of Abhay Deol in his father’s funeral (look where Kashyap displaces it in the narrative line) show a systematic and intended pauperization of Dev. These were so liberating to me! To use expressions out of the coffers of history: Dev is getting declassed, de-bourgeoisfied! He is reducing himself to nothing, burning his dad’s developmental money away (the dad runs an iron-and-steel plant which recalled my childhood years in Bengal’s leading industrial township, when the nation was so socialist and Nehruvian). When Dev had a fat purse and credit-cards, he was pursued by pimps. When he has nothing, he is beaten up because of precisely so. And then the dizzy unexpected, unexplained accident he witnesses!

It is exhilarating. Kashyap’s cinema, though it works broadly within mainstream frameworks, is art. One can work out a template how to pursuit art following him. Be uncompromising, be brutal, care a damn, work within the frameworks you are provided and rip it apart, quote, steal and refer everything you regard worthwhile and still, beyond a devilish fun you make of the system, be earnest, be emotional, be thoroughly personal in such way that people cringe at the face of your regarding that you have the most valuable things to say under the sun. Arrogance, in short. Sincerity, in another word.

And you might say nothing. Kashyap is always incomplete, has nothing to sermon about. He is not ‘great’. Even when he says something, opines about something, he leaves things tantalizingly incomplete. Chanda says to Dev in the film, painting Dev’s face into a Heath-Ledger-Joker that he can talk now. Did Dev talk? I suspect. He is not sure of his language, not sure of his content, he has lots to say, he doesn’t know how to. It is gratifying that someone wants to hear. It is not imperative that you should be able to say it. Now.

But should a moment come, you should be able to dare a perfect and precise speech. An overlooked scene in Dev.D literally brought tears in my eyes (unfashionable reception-habits for a Kashyap film?). Chanda, recalling her father’s suicide after her MMS sex-scandal, says: “he would have said – forget it baby, what has happened has happened, let’s forget it; instead, he shot himself”. Dev asks her to come closer, hugs her tight and says, “forget it baby, what has happened has happened, let’s forget it.” That is the perfect ethical speech. We, numbed at the sentiments of our maudlin Hindi cinema, experience emotions, purely renewed. And Kashyap is equally capable of perfect, precise, ethical, cinematic speech.

Intend to continue this post…