Sunday, April 5, 2009

Stor-re-telling

Just finished watching Dev D, and I can't help drawing parallels with another re-told movie Mithya (Starring Ranveer Shorey and Neha Dhupia).
They were both based on retro superhits - Devdas and Don. There were "popular" remakes of both these movies, and both starring Shah Rukh Khan. Although, Bansali's Devdas will go down as another classic, Farhan Akhtar's Don will probably lost in the memory lane.

Dev D and Mithya are lesser-known directors' bold and unique re-interpretation of classic stories. In Mithya, Rajat Kapoor highlights the true sense of an identity crisis. The red diary in Bachchan's Don and the CD in Shah Rukh's Don were the sole evidence of the don-imposter's true identity, the loss of which puts the protagonist in dire situations, but is found eventually. In Mithya, there is no diary or CD, just the imposter's memory which tells him who he originally is - and the poor fellow loses his memory actually, and begins to think that he is in fact The Don. Now that's an identity crisis! The highlight of this movie - after the memory loss, Ranveer has a dream, where the scene he sees is from his original life, but the characters filling the scene are from the goon gang he is living with.

Dev D is Anurag Kashyap's no-holds-barred tandav! Its the same as Sehwag mercilessly assaulting the bowlers irrespective of the match situation or like Yanni creating magic out of disparate instruments in incongruous tones - "take that! its my choice, its my freedom!".
The re-interpretation in Dev D is more in terms of characters than the plot, except of course the fact that its set in modern day Punjab. Dev is the quintessential egotist, an impulsive one at that - a character for whom you sense early that he is on the doom path, for whom you feel like advising at first but later retort that he deserved this! The non-mortal end for this character in the story was the master stroke, because such characters exist in the real world, they survive.

Ram gopal verma ki aag... oh puhlease!! Lets not honor it by talking about it in this league.

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