Movie: Devdas [Cohabiting with Technique]

Actors: SRK, Madhuri Dixit, Aishwarya Rai
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Producer: Sanjay Leela Bhansali



In academic terms, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulent saga ‘Devdas’ has turned out to be a rare, even strange, product of aesthetic experimentation. We see Passion, even love making, transformed into Show Business. Every single emotion and each moment in the screen-life of the film’s characters is presented only through the generic idiom of the studio film.

In Bhansali’s version of love as catharsis, nothing outside the grand film studio intrudes into the lives or characterizations of the people he recreates for his audience. The camera never steps outside the film’s sets; quite determined to emphasize that everything outside the sets of ‘Devdas’ is irrelevant to this re-telling of the epic romantic tragedy.

Therefore, the film is actually a grand tribute to the technique of film-making at a Mumbai studio. The haveli of the Mukherjee zamindars, who put their foot down on son Devdas’s yearning for his childhood sweetheart, is the center of the film’s cosmos. Since this is entirely a studio narration, Paro’s house is much on the lines of a Mumbai flat across the street and when Devdas and Paro flirt across the balconies with ornate opera-house binoculars the geographical distance between the two havelis is as small as those two flats in that VIP Frenchie advertisement.

These two studio constructions entirely dominate the film’s galaxy in the first half. Later, when the camera consents to incorporate the presence of one more planet, we have a visitation to a row of palatial “kotha” mansions put together by the best carpenters available to art director Nitin Desai. To symbolize the water of life in this uniquely conceived universe, there is a huge water tank, several fountains and even a studio-built section of a river. To symbolize the journey across this precious stratosphere, we have a luxuriantly decorated railway compartment.

All these constructions are a marvel of film studio engineering and are adorned by a veritable tapestry of orchestrated lights and iridescent effects, so that it appears as if the film has taken us into the ethereal world of the stars in the sky, where the sun around which everything revolves is the movie camera. Therefore, the real stars of the real film studio – that is, Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Madhuri Dixit and Jackie Shroff – are themselves transformed into extra-terrestrial cinematic images conjured together by top shots and pans, close-ups and dissolves and are drenched in the mystic light of filters and exposures and the exquisite work of make-up men and costume designers.

It is to the cinema techniques that conjure up this rarified world that Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s interpretation of Sarat Chandra’s novel is dedicated. His film is an extended demonstration of his passionate cohabitation with technique.

In that context Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ (2002) is reminiscent of Mani Kaul’s ‘Uski Roti’ (1970) – both films made as intellectual extravaganzas. If the parameters defining Mani Kaul’s film were inspired by the cinema of Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman and Bunuel, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ has been shaped in the director’s mind by memories of two popular classics - ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ and ‘Pakeezah’.

Whether Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ surpasses its own predecessors or not, depends entirely on its box office receipts. As the most expensive film production ever undertaken at Mumbai, it must necessarily meet the first requirement of the Popular Classic definition – it must recover costs and commissions and make a profit.

Other parameters for a film to be defined as a Popular Classic are that, firstly, it must be talked-about in exalted terms by its audience; secondly it must win appreciation at all levels – according to the film industry’s division of A-class, B-class and C-class centres for all the cities and towns; and thirdly it must have value as a re-run later.

What does seem apparent at this stage is that Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ must compare favourably with Kamal Amrohi’s ‘Pakeezah’, because that is the film after which Bhansali has stylized his own film, advertently or unconsciously.

Is it going to be another ‘Pakeezah’ in the hall of fame or not? Will Ismail Darbar’s musical score for this film match the irresistible immortality of Ghulam Mohammad’s compositions for the Meena Kumari classic? Do the dances choreographed for Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in ‘Devdas’ have the same seductive magic as the kathak numbers performed on similarly lavish sets by Meena Kumari and her troupe of dancers? These are the subliminal issues that will decide the popular status of Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ in the years to come; and not so much the question whether the talented Shah Rukh Khan has performed at par with Dilip Kumar and K.L. Saigal.