मायाजाल ...

हर सपना देखा सा लगता है
हर आइना बिखरा सा लगता है
तेरी नज़र मेरी रूह पिघला रही है, और
हर लम्हा बेमानी सा लगता है
मैं जहाँ थी अभी भी वहीँ हूँ
हर कोई जो पास था
अब धुंधला सा लगता है...

Long overdue…A movie flowing in frames…

I had written this ages ago...don't know why never posted it...anyways here it is now...

As I go about some of my fav blogs and see every one of them writing about Dev-D…I am engulfed with guilt of not penning my thoughts…

If there was ever any hype for any movie for me, it was Dev-D…having close to heart people closely associated with this movie…having heard awesome comments about the script, music, about the movie…I was just dying to see it…

I had heard the music long before the movie was released…the songs in themselves are addictive and psychedelic…so much so that I have heard the songs over and over again…and there is a song for every mood and (you discover later in the movie) for every character…the songs have so much of character in them that they tell a story even when you haven’t seen the movie…”hadh se behad hadh kar di”…need I say more…

The movie is radical in more ways than one…I will begin with the adaptation…having read the original book…having seen innumerable Hindi and Bengali movies on the subject, I still could not have predicted the characters in the movie…they have been adapted with such brilliance and honesty…things, feelings which are there, which we experience but hypocritical as we are, we don’t accept…I was amazed that the director could portray them with such panache….be it paro who is so in touch with her sexuality…or dev who is unapologetic about his addictions and way of life or chanda who discovers life and freedom behind a mask…there are multiple layers to every character…

For the first time I felt the Indian cinema broke the shackles of the plot and ventured into the actual realm of film making…it reminds you of Ingmar Bergman in “Through a Glass Darkly” or Alfred Hitchcock in “I Confess” (I know I repeat these way too often :) ) or Lars von Trier with his “Dancer in the Dark” or “Europa”…

The brilliance is in the making of the movie…the way the movie moved between frames for me flowing seamlessly was awesome…and the fact that the music was so much a part of the movie that you never realize that there are close to 18 songs there…there are scenes which are executed with no nonsense…all I know is that if I have to tell about the movie to someone I will just show some of these frames to them…

One must applaud the actors…Abhay Deol who could have easily let the role slip into that of a “pathetic sex addict cum drunkard and loser” brilliantly manages to internalize the character and deliver a performance par excellence and Kalki for the rendition of Chanda without guilt, with complete awareness of self, without being bogged down with stale morality and judgment…

Overall for me the movie brings o life what was missing from Indian cinema…