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Release
date:
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April 27, 2018
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Director:
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Sudhir Mishra
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Cast:
Language:
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Rahul Bhat, Richa
Chadha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Saurabh Shukla, Vipin Sharma, Dalip Tahil, Deepraj
Rana, Anil George, Sohaila Kapur, Vineet Kumar Singh, Anurag Kashyap
Hindi
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Text flashed on screen before the
first scene rolls lets on that this film is inspired by both Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay’s novella Devdas, arguably
the most adapted home-grown literary work in Indian cinema, and William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What common
ground could there possibly be between the story of a weak-willed Bengali
aristocrat drowning his unconsummated love in alcohol, and a Danish prince
drowning in a desire for revenge against his scheming uncle and allegedly traitorous
mother? What meeting point is there between a spineless fellow who wept at a
fate he could have fashioned if he had had the courage to defy his convention-ridden,
classist parents, and another so single-minded in his quest for vendetta that
he let everything else in his life slip away as a result?
The answer is quite simple,
actually: it lies in the self-destructiveness of both Hamlet and Devdas. In
merging these two characters and turning each on its head in the end, Sudhir
Mishra has conducted one of the most exciting writing experiments seen in a
while for the Hindi film screen. The writer-director’s protagonist Dev Pratap
Chauhan (played by Rahul Bhat) is melancholy like the legendary fictional men
on whom he is based, but is not fatalistic like the foolish – and frankly,
boring – Devdas, nor quite as mentally muddled as Hamlet.
Mishra’s Daas Dev might have been phenomenal then if its women characters –
based on the Paro, Chandramukhi and Queen Gertrude prototypes – had been
written as well as the leading man. Sadly, they are not.
Daas Dev is set in the political badlands
of Uttar Pradesh where, in the opening scene in 1997, we see Dev’s father, the
charismatic star politician Vishambhar Pratap Chauhan’s very public and
untimely death before his little son’s eyes. Twenty years later, the boy is now
a drug addict, an alcoholic and a laggard, in love with his childhood friend
Paro (Richa Chadha), daughter of his late father’s right hand man Naval Singh
(Anil George) who has been politically exiled by Dev’s uncle Awdesh Pratap
Chauhan (Saurabh Shukla).
The Chauhan family wealth is
managed by Shrikant Sahay (Dalip Tahil) and his Woman Friday cum
fixer-about-town Chandni Mehra (Aditi Rao Hydari) who is in love with Dev. She
watches over him through his tumultuous relationships, his desperate attempt to
recover from his substance abuse and his journey from indifference to interest
in politics, knowing that he does not reciprocate her feelings for him.
The first half hour of Daas Dev is intriguing. Chandni is the
narrator, the one who has watched and seen more than anyone realises. Oddly
enough though, she is completely marginalised halfway through the storyline, so
that what remains of her in memory now is not her strength but Hydari’s
flawless back to which Mishra has paid considerably greater attention than to
the writing of her character.
Paro and Chandramukhi were far
more appealing people than Devdas in the original text. The screenplay by
Mishra and Jaydeep Sarkar does wonderful things to the main man but seems not
to know what to do with these two strong women. Richa Chadha still manages to lend
some spark to Paro, but Hydari seems unable to rise above her exquisite looks
to invest herself in Chandni. More than ever, her limp performance made me long
for Madhuri Dixit’s firecracker of a Chandramukhi in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s
2002 extravaganza Devdas.
As for Gertrude, in this case
Dev’s mother Sushila Devi (Sohaila Kapur) – she exists on the sidelines for so
long that even the wonderful Kapur’s speaking eyes cannot save her from being
anything other than a sidelight, albeit one who eventually turns out to be
pivotal to the plot.
The men are better served by the
writing, and some of them return the favour with gusto. Rahul Bhat has the
remarkable ability to look bruised, damaged and torn when he gets into a
character. His Dev, who is a slave (daas)
of his own weaknesses until he finds his life’s purpose, is a beautifully
broken fellow, still mourning the loss of a beloved father he idolised and
deriving his earnestness towards politics from the memory of that idealistic
man. Bhat gives his character both vulnerability and strength, making you
wonder why we see him so rarely on the big screen and why he is so vastly
underrated.
DoP Sachin K. Krishn’s use of darkness
and shadows in Daas Dev enhances the air
of intrigue in the plot and is especially dramatic around Dev. There are shots
in which his face is completely black, his reactions therefore inscrutable if
it weren’t for the actor’s body language.
Vipin Sharma playing a wily
politician is fantastic as always, as is Saurabh Shukla.
Producer-director-writer Anurag Kashyap makes a short but impactful appearance
as Vishambhar, giving us yet another reminder – after 2016’s Akira – that he is an under-explored
actor. Vineet Kumar Singh, who was astonishingly good on his debut as a lead earlier
this year in Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz, is impressive
in a brief role as a man in love with Paro.
The uneven characterisation
apart, the plot too unfolds in a series of twists and turns that, though not
unconvincing, play out in a narrative style that feels by now too familiar in
the mould of films made by Prakash Jha, Kashyap and Mishra himself.
Someone on the team of Daas Dev seems to have assumed that you
can compensate for inconsistent writing with an unrelenting soundtrack.
Although several of the songs in Daas Dev are quite lovely (in particular Sehmi
hai dhadkan composed by Vipin Patwa, Rangdaari
by Arko and Challa chaap chunariya by
Sandesh Shandilya) there are just too many musical interludes in the film, and
the songs and background score are played too much and too loud so that at one
point when a character snapped, “Can you shut off that damned song?” for a
moment I thought someone in the audience had called out those words because the
music had gotten so overbearing by then.
It is surprising that writing
would be the Achilles heel of a film by Mishra, the man who co-wrote the
screenplay of Kundan Shah’s cult classic Jaane
Bhi Do Yaaro, but that is the way the cookie crumbles in Daas Dev. When Mishra released Yeh Saali Zindagi in 2011, I remember
writing that that film felt over-crowded with characters and complications.
Ditto for this one. A Devdas-cum-Hamlet story still feels like it is
worth a shot, perhaps even another shot by Mishra, but this one fails to live
up to its promise despite an excellent
central performance and an unusual interpretation of two iconic literary
characters.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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140 minutes
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A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DaasdevTheFilm/
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