Platonic love is passé; today’s Devdas watches porn, snorts coke, gulps Vodka and gets laid. Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D is as much a love story as Burn after Reading was a spy movie. This is an irreverent, madcap, and psychedelic ride through the kind of quirky filmmaking championed by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Bros. The classic tale of doomed romance and the destruction inflicted upon himself by a tragic hero has attained darkly funny and remarkably visceral proportions in the non-conformist hands of the maverick director. The visuals have been brilliantly juxtaposed with the inner-workings of the protagonist’s mind and the complex chemistry he shares with his childhood sweetheart and a hooker, and would remind one of such “addictive” movies as Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream on one hand, and Christopher Doyle’s iconic montages in Wong Kar-Wai films on the other. The acting is quite good, especially with Abhay Deol putting in a remarkably restrained performance in a role that was tailor-made for histrionics. The real star of the movie, however, is the awesome funk-rock soundtrack the kind of which has rarely, if ever, been heard in Hindi movies. The auteur (yes, he can be called one) deserves kudos for having the guts to make a no-holes-barred, kick-ass movie like this; my friends and I had a blast watching it as I’m sure he had while making it. And those of you who feel that Karan Johar is the greatest filmmaker in Bombay today, I'm sure you already know that you aren't really fit to watch Dev D.
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Genre: Black Comedy/Urban Drama/Psychedelic Drama/Romance/Experimental Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India
