Fiery unforgettably unstoppable in her self-worth… Paro, now transposed to Punjab (gawd, yeh ladki kahan-kahan jayegi?!) knows her Devdas just back from England wants some quality sex. As determined as ever, she cycles to the nearest sugarcane fields with a bulky bedroll tied to the carrier, spreads it, and herself, out for her foreign-returned lover-boy…
That image of the super-determined Paro cycling to sex in the fields, compounded with that brilliantly shot sequence where she explodes her bitterness, frustration and anger by pressing down on a handpump as thought it were a….never mind!… qualify as two of the most astutely achieved images of literature-on-cinema in recent Bollywood memory.
Anurag Kashyap at last sheds his obstinate inaccessibility as a filmmaker. More a homage to Sanjay Leela Bhansali than litterateur Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Devdas, Kashyap’s Dev D is that deep liberating lascivious luscious provocative tantalizing and tragic view of tragic hedonism, ruinous self-indulgence and vain miscommunication that Saratchandra barely thought about but couldn’t articulate.
Kashyap’s Devdas is a raunchy renegade, a bastard of the first order who thinks of only self-gratification. And his task is made easier by the two women who come into his life in this splendidly tragi-comic subversion of a timeless novel that said, defeatism is heroic. But only when compounded by the ability to confront your weaknesses headlong.
As Dev D, Abhay Patel, that big-little hero of the outr
