The film opens in Jahana, Uttar Pradesh, in 1997. His mind addled with drugs and drinks, Dev is driven by the imposed need to carry his father's legacy forward and his wavering emotions for his childhood love, a feisty Paro Singh (Chadha), and the willowy femme fatale Chandni Mehra (Hydari).ĭaas Dev, about individuals grappling to take control of their fates, is a tale told by a woman - Chandni, a present-day incarnation of Chandramukhi, who banks upon her seductive guiles to manipulate the men around her who feel that they wield power over her but are in reality mere putty in her hands.
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But circumstances suck him into the vortex of overarching ambition and unbridled passion. The male protagonist, Dev Pratap Chauhan (Rahul Bhat), the scion of a political family that has seen better days, is a drunken wreck, a complete misfit in this jungle. Krishn's controlled lighting and evocative play with shadows and silhouettes create the right visual angularities for this twisted tale of relentless trickery. The editing by Archit Rastogi is true to the spirit of the tale, lending the narrative its pace and dynamism while director of photography Sachin K. She is a bolt from the blue, a shriek of defiance, a reminder that no woman in this seemingly patriarchal set-up is to be taken lightly. The women give absolutely nothing away and Dev eventually has to beat a hasty retreat.Īt another crucial plot point, the one woman in the story who seems trapped in silent oblivion - Paro's reticent mother Malti (Ekavali Khanna) - finds her voice and asserts her presence. In one startling scene, a political muscleman who has fallen foul of the male protagonist uses the women in his home - his three wives and 15 daughters - as a protective shield. They are strong-willed, assertive individuals who can stare down anybody who looks them in the eye in the misplaced hope of browbeating them into submission.Īnd it isn't just the present-day Paro and Chandramukhi who don a steely cloak. It isn't solely by separating Dev and Daas in the title and changing the established sequence that Mishra flips the gender balance around. It encapsulates the chaos and cacophony of a setting that is infested by power-crazed men jousting with all their might to protect their turfs and wily women blessed with strong survival instincts. The early breakneck speed may be disorienting for some, but it is absolutely in order. It reveals its key dramatis personae in a blinding rush. The film seeks to draw attention to many politically inflected issues of the day - land rights, farmers' unrest, indiscriminate bauxite mining and political adventurism bred by a sense of impunity - but does not get bogged down by its bleeding-heart impulses.ĭaas Dev hits the ground running and plunges headlong into the heart of the action.
They play a bunch of excitable, loud and irrepressible characters in a story of love, lies, greed and skullduggery that hinges on grand dramatic flourishes. Good as the three principal actors - Rahul Bhat, Richa Chadha and Aditi Rao Hydari - are, it is the supporting cast of Saurabh Shukla, Vipin Sharma, Sohaila Kapur, Ekavali Khanna, Anil George, Deepraj Rana and Vineet Kumar Singh that propels the drama forward. Mishra has a bunch of tremendously malleable actors to interpret his vision.
The jaunty, sweeping, rough-hewn storytelling style - he favours high-pitched expression over subtle enunciation, especially in the dramatic flashpoints - mirrors the fraught, unsteady nature of the world he depicts.ĭaas DevMovie Review: A still from the film. The writer-director locates his intriguing synthesis in the explosive epicenter of a regional power struggle in a fictional Uttar Pradesh town where the law is at the mercy of the very people who are charged with enforcing its rule. The doomed love story of Devdas gets a vigorous contemporary spin - it isn't quite as downbeat as the much-filmed original - and the tragic revenge saga of Hamlet winds up in a shadowy political household where intrigue and conspiracy lurk in every shady nook. Cast: Richa Chadha, Rahul Bhat, Aditi Rao Hydari, Saurabh Shukla, Anurag Kashyap, Dalip Tahilĭedicated at once to Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, William Shakespeare and freedom fighter-politician Dwarka Prasad Mishra (the director's own grandfather), Sudhir Mishra's first film since 2013's Inkaar is an audacious, dizzying, pulsating drama that merges two literary classics, Devdas and Hamlet, and transports them to a place light years away from their respective cores.
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