In a wonderfully composed scene, a married Paro (an explosive Mahie) meets her ex beau Dev (a perfectly slothful Abhay) in his hotel room. She chides him for the mess, asks him to take a bath and washes his filthy clothes. He says he loves her; she gets busy arranging his room. As always, they fight like animals. The Paro-Dev love is all about "biting" and "chewing", it’s lascivious and lusty and so shorn of sentimentality that you feel alienated from Dev rather than sympathise with him. The triumph of Kashyap’s revisionist take is that it puts Devdas in his place—a self-destructive loser, not a tragic hero (it’s he who rejects Paro, not his family, mind you). On the other hand, Paro knows exactly what she wants—sex or marriage.
The tenderness comes out in the protective friendship Dev strikes with Chanda (Kalki as the vulnerable Lolita) whose life has been wrecked by the MMS scandal. She says all she needed from her father was a hug and Dev cuddles her in return. These little touches catch your eye. Like the phallic reference when Paro pounds away at the handpump on being spurned by Dev, or that delightfully flummoxed look on her husband’s face as he watches his brand-new wife dance maniacally.
While Kashyap’s story is Indian, his cinematic influences come from the West—Danny Boyle of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. The neon Paharganj, the carnivalesque, hallucinatory feel, characters living on the fringes—Kashyap’s nonconformist young cinema is not the brand-peddling Karan Johar sort, nor is it the sanitised Rock On variety. It’s about the ugly sub-culture—the hedonism and debauchery, rootlessness and irresponsibility, vodka and coke, cyber sex and MMS porn—a world we know of but squirm at.
But Kashyap does lose his grip towards the end—Dev D’s voyage of self-discovery stretches on. The three men with hats, the clown face of Dev, Moravia’s Contempt—the references get esoteric and obtuse. That’s where the largely intoxicating film turns exhausting.
