REVIEW 593: DAAS DEV

Release date:	April 27, 2018
Director:	Sudhir Mishra
Cast: Language:	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

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/daas-dev-movie-review-sudhir-mishra-stands-devdas-and-hamlet-nicely-on-their-heads-but-does-not-live-up-to-his-own-promise-4447635.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DaasdevTheFilm/

REVIEW 294: HAIDER

Release date:	October 2, 2014
Director:	Vishal Bhardwaj
Cast: Language:	Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon, Narendra Jha, Shraddha Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Lalit Parimoo, Aamir Bashir, Ashish Vidyarthi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda Hindi

“Inteqaam se sirf inteqaam paida hota hai. Jab tak hum apne inteqaam se azaad nahin honge, koi azaadi humey azaad nahin kar sakti.”

These words from writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider are as relevant to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The thing about strong adaptations is that while they are at one level inseparable from the original, they also determinedly stand on their own. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark in which The Bard set his play. Four centuries later, Vishal finds that rot in the festering wounds of militancy-and-Army-ridden Kashmir where a young man returns home from Aligarh to find his father missing and his beautiful mother apparently being courted by his uncle.

From the template provided by Shakespeare’s play, Vishal and co-writer Basharat Peer have carved out Haider (played by Shahid Kapoor), his father Dr Hilaal Meer (Narendra Jha), Haider’s mother Ghazala (Tabu), Dr Meer’s brother Khurram (Kay Kay Menon), Haider’s girlfriend Arshia Lone (Shraddha Kapoor) and a whole range of other characters completely rooted in the snow and soil and political turmoil of Kashmir.

Haider is not about state politics though. It is about individuals using political scenarios to further petty personal goals, while appearing to support a larger cause.

And with that, Vishal Bhardwaj is back in form, people! There’s been a steady decline in the quality of his work, from Kaminey (2009), a nice film that somewhere along the way overwhelmed its soul with its stylised storytelling; to the mixed bag that was Saat Khoon Maaf (2011), where once again it seemed in places that he was trying to be someone he was not; and last year’s disappointing Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola. Haider is not utterly, unquestionably brilliant like the other two films in his Shakespeare trilogy, Maqbool and Omkara, but it is certainly a worthy companion to them.

The beauty of that quote (marginally edited) posted at the start of this review is that when Ghazala utters those words to her son she is referring to his self-destructive quest for revenge in his personal life, but the reference could well have been to the bitterness of Kashmiri Muslims towards the Indian state. As layered as Vishal and Basharat’s screenplay is Tabu’s performance as Ghazala. She is brooding in places, playful elsewhere, and it’s impossible to tell until the final scene whether she was truly duplicitous or a victim of a mentally disturbed Haider’s imagination; whether she was indeed a willing participant in the intrigues against her husband or a pawn in a wily relative’s game or a little bit of both.

The film is less judgemental towards Ghazala/Gertrude and Arshia/Ophelia than the play was, and Haider/Hamlet’s animosity towards Khurram/Claudius is shown to be not entirely innocent. Many literary critics have read an Oedipal desire into Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude. Here it is more pronounced, driven home through Haider’s physical interactions with Ghazala and some clever casting. Tabu is merely 10 years older than Shahid. This does not, however, come across as just another instance of the sexism that prompts Bollywood to routinely give women roles they are too young for and men roles they are too old for. Tabu as Ghazala looks less like Haider’s mother and more like a hot older girlfriend. Theirs is an intriguing, disquieting bond.

Through this awkward personal relationship playing out in the foreground, Vishal delivers a politically brave film in which AFSPA is derided in verse and stone throwers are metaphorically referenced with deathly rocks. Haider is also that rare Hindi film (like YRF’s Fanaa) which risks bringing up the promised plebiscite that never took place.

It needs to be said though that notwithstanding a passing mention of how Kashmiri Pandits were driven out of their homes, Haider is told entirely through the Muslim gaze. Well, that too is a point of view we need to hear, especially since the film does not seek to appease the community. It not only portrays Army torture of Muslims civilians and the desolation of the real life Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons; it also shows the repeated betrayal of Muslims by fellow Muslims. What’s missing – disappointingly – is an equal sensitivity towards the betrayal of Pandits, which we got in Aamir Bashir’s achingly desolate Harud (2012) even though that was a film about the misery of Muslims in the state today; and Onir’s brilliant I Am (2011), which was about the strained bond between a Pandit girl and her Muslim childhood friend.

In this context one of the text plates at the end of the film is clumsy in its effort to pander to right-wing nationalists outside the state. Why else was it deemed necessary to salute the Army’s role in the recent Kashmir floods in black-and-white, when it had no relevance to this particular story? If Vishal and his co-producers panicked or were bullied into posting that salaam, they should have been less gauche about it.

Just as poorly conceived is the plot point that finally explains the treachery towards Dr Hilaal. Without revealing anything, I ask this: Could someone be so stupid as to not even worry about a possible phone tap in a state where suspicion hangs thick in the air? Haider and Arshia’s lovemaking is also exasperating – old-fashioned Hindi filmi copulation hesitating to be as modern as it wants to be. C’mon, when you intend to plant lips on lips, why dawdle before getting to that point? The scene and the accompanying song pointlessly slow down Haider.

It’s interesting that the voices raised against the non-Manipuri Priyanka Chopra being cast as Mary Kom have been silent on the casting of a bunch of non-Kashmiris – not counting Lalit Parimoo and Aamir Bashir – to play Kashmiris in a film set in Kashmir. Seriously, that shouldn’t be an overriding problem in any film unless the filmmaker is intentionally racist or the cast ends up caricaturing accents and using excessive makeup or prosthetics to look different from what they are in reality. No one does that in Haider. In such a scenario, if actors want to give the local accent a shot, they should either go all the way (without making a mockery of it) or not try it at all. The hazards of half measures are evident in Kay Kay’s elongated “ghaaar” which pops up like a sore thumb, and Shraddha who is compelled by the screenplay to emphasise her Kashmiri English in one scene, which does not blend with the way she speaks in the rest of the film.

Barring these reservations, there is much that is poignant, profound and poetic in Haider. The transposing of a European Christian story to an Indian Muslim (rather than Hindu) community facilitates the use of some legendary motifs from the original play such as the gravediggers’ scene. In fact the shovelling of the snow here yields one of the most memorable uses we’ve seen in a Hindi film of a throbbing, crunching natural sound flowing into music.

That goosebump-inducing scene is preceded by others and gives way to many more. There are moments during the stunningly sung, photographed and choreographed song Bismil, as Haider leaps in the air, stomps about making staccato moves uncharacteristic of Bollywood, thrusts and parries with Gulzar’s words set to Vishal’s eerily pulsating melody in Sukhwinder’s booming voice, when it’s hard to tell whether you are listening to your own raised heartbeat or the song.

Shahid is one of the Hindi film industry’s best dancers, but in Bismil – Vishal’s interpretation of the play-within-a-play scene in Hamlet – he has outdone himself by stepping out of his skin and into the spirit of his character. Except for fleeting moments when the actor Shahid Kapoor becomes visible on screen, this is what he achieves with his rendition of Haider as a whole. In fact, with the exception of the accent trip-ups, most of the actors in the film hit the bull’s eye, with the towering Tabu being matched scene for scene by Kay Kay. The wonderful Narendra Jha stays etched in the memory despite his limited screen time. In terms of both writing and acting, the disappointment of the lot is the usually impeccable Irrfan. His Roohdhaar is given a grand entrance befitting a mainstream masala star, but then remains curiously impactless.

Partnering Vishal in this celluloid elegy is DoP Pankaj Kumar. It takes a special kind of talent to visit a place famed for its magnificence and sock us between the eyes as he does with its visuals, as if we’re seeing it for the first time. His canvas extends from the splendid scenery to Tabu’s splendid face and gruesome, bloody scenes in which the camera refuses to be exploitative.

As any adaptation of Hamlet would be, Haider is grim. It bears repeating that this is not a film about Kashmir; it’s about the man Haider/Hamlet and the opportunities provided to the characters in his story when the setting happens to be Kashmir. With its constant theatricality and melodrama, Haider is a continuous bow to the medium Hamlet was written for. The result is a stirring, unsettling tale that needs not just to be watched, but to be experienced.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	162 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haider_(film)