Dev.D

Dev.D, which was shown at the Venice film festival, is a modern re-telling of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s popular novel Devdas, which has seen some thirteen remakes in Indian cinema, including a version by Sanjay Leela Bhansali that screened at Cannes. The story tells of a rich country boy Dev.D (Abhay Deol), who is in love with his low caste childhood friend Paro (Mahie Gill), but is sent to London to study. On his return, he accuses her of infidelity, driving her to marry a much older man, but realises on her wedding day that he was wrong. Having lost the love of his life, he descends into a self-destructive spiral of sex, alcohol and drugs. He soon befriends a hooker, Chanda (Kalki Koechlin), a student abandoned by her family after her nude pictures are circulated over the mobile phone network; like Paro, she mothers him for a while. The screenplay is considerably updated to address the concerns of today’s youth – sexual permissiveness, alcohol and liberated women. In a telling scene, Paro brazenly arranges for a roll in the fields, but returns disappointed, her mattress tied to her cycle. There are too many songs, but we do get the feisty "Emotional Atyachar” (emotional suicide), with Nawazuddin Siddiqui playing a smalltown Presley from Patna. Abhay Deol is well cast as a man filled with self-pity when he fails to stand up for his lover; Mahie Gill shines in a small role.