By DEREK BOSE, The Statesman / Asia News Network
Recent trends in Bollywood movies seem to suggest the demise of the sensitive, tenderly-in-love leading man. The contemporary hero is complex, brutish and muscular.
ANURAG Kashyap’s Dev D is about an emotionally dysfunctional guy who has to deal with two strong, sharp-tongued and liberated women – a childhood sweetheart and a sex worker – in what is being viewed as a post-modernist cinematic interpretation of the by-now-popular catchphrase, “immosunul atyachar” – emotional tyranny.
Whether the high-pitched romanticism of Devender Singh Dhillon could have worked with audiences even five years back (when Shah Rukh Khan played Devdas in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film) is, of course, a debatable point. All the 12 versions of the film made so far have remained faithful to the tone and tenor of the Sarat Chandra classic written almost a century ago.
Kashyap retains the template, but reinterprets the idea of self-destructive love in the light of attitudes and the sensibilities of present-day youth. The wastrel of Dev D is someone we all know of and, perhaps, could have even met in real life.
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