From the Daily Telegraph:
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/arts....ft.html
Bollywood disaster movie
(Filed: 12/07/2002)
Devdas is a remake of one of India's most popular films and the most expensive ever produced in Bombay. It's also embarrassingly bad, says Sukhdev Sandhu
Devdas (PG cert, 178 min)
Canny shoppers who live in west London often spend their Sunday afternoons on Southall Broadway. The jammed roads point to the fact that you can get pretty much anything there at ultra-cheap prices: clothes, Indian foods, films. Especially films. Turbanned guys, veritable Sikh Del Boys in their knock-off Hilfiger sweatshirts and wide-boy patter, sidle up to idle customers: "You like Hindi film? Plenty here. VHS, DVD. Anything you want. They're from Canada - excellent quality, you know. Two for £15." If they haven't got the title you're after, they'll make sure it's in next week. "No problems, no?"
Devdas which stars Madhuri Dixit as a beautiful courtesan, may be colourful and tumultuous, but the spectacle does not make up for an absence of soul
It certainly is a problem for the Bombay film industry, which has long been trying to crack down on the huge counterfeit market. Contrary to press reports suggesting that Denise Van Outen prancing about in a Kama Sutra print dress amounts to a meaningful blow for Bollywood, it has been hard economics that have driven its recent prominence in the West. Movie studios know that costlier ticket prices outside India mean they need audiences only a tenth of their normal size for their films to recoup their costs.
A lot of industry hopes are resting on Devdas. It's the most expensive film ever shot in India. The first mainstream Hindi film to have been screened in Cannes, starring box-office honeys such as the former Miss World Aishwarya Rai and Benicio del Toro lookalike Shah Rukh Khan, it's also a remake of one of the most popular Indian movies ever made.
Devdas (Khan) is an uppity young man from the landowning class who from an early age has been in love with the less socially elevated Paro (Rai). They tease each other and fight. When he hits Paro, it feels to her like a kiss.
Sent away to be educated in London, he returns to find that his autocratic and snobbish parents have barred him from marrying her because she's not genteel enough. She gets wed to an aristocratic widower, who is still in love with his dead wife, while Devdas turns to beer and brothels. A beautiful courtesan called Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit) is enamoured of him, but he is paralysed - without soul, intent, purpose. Eventually, there is a rapprochement of sorts between the three young people, but they are all doomed never to be with the person they most desire.
Originally a popular Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Devdas was made into two famous films by P C Barua and Bimal Roy, in 1935 and 1955 respectively, both offer visions of love quite as wonderful, melancholic and romantic as, say, Gone With the Wind or In a Lonely Place. They were subtle, naturalistic films that eschewed the stagey histrionics of early Indian cinema. Would that the same could be said of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's new version. Produced, appropriately enough, by MegaBollywood Pvt Ltd, it's a bombastic and lumberingly industrial work that should embarrass all those involved in its making.
The chief problem with Devdas is watching it. It looks absolutely horrid. The interiors are appealing - if you're Imelda Marcos. The two lovers' families' homes are crammed with fountains, grand pianos, friezes and four-poster beds. The courtyards are gold and marble. Paro spends half the film running through endless corridors, her gaudy jewellery and bracelets jangling as she does so. A gloopy, jelabi-orange finish has been given to everything and everyone. This isn't to convey the charmlessness of the bourgeoisie. Rather, it's the work of a set designer whose idea of sophistication appears to have been drawn from Ferrero Rocher ads. In this lavish la-la land where even Calcutta's red-light area looks like a tourist resort, poverty has been aestheticised. The gap between rich and poor, so central to this story of romance stymied by social inequality, is rendered invisible.
The saving grace of many recent Bollywood films has been their soundtracks. It's been their bane, too, for the music too often takes precedence over plotting or character. Here, most of Ismail Darbar's songs are a frightening marriage of Enya-style folk-lite wibbling and faux-Riverdance hippety-hopping. Bad news is accompanied by ludicrous synth-whip sounds.
Such OTT cacophony is in keeping with the acting in this film which, with the exception of the ever-beguiling Dixit, is risible. Rai, dimply and doe-eyed, coos and trills like an asthmatic mynah bird. There's no chemistry between her and Khan who, like the rest of the cast, has apparently been told to perform like a second-rate mime artist: sadness is connoted by a clutched brow, happiness by a clutched stomach. Excitation and exaggeration are the stock emotional responses throughout the film. Swoon follows rapture, rapture swoon. The quality of the dialogue is best conveyed by an early exchange after Devdas returns home from London: "Have you brought me a big foreign watch?" "No, but I bring fortuitous times."
Devdas is set in the Calcutta of the 1930s, but it fails to evoke any sense of time or space. It gives its audience a tacky, cartoon version of Bollywood. Colourful and tumultuous it my be, but its preoccupation with spectacle does not make up for the absence of soul.
For that you should check out the Bimal Roy version which is now available on DVD. And, if it's good contemporary Bollywood films you're after you might want to turn to Dil Se or Lagaan. This movie, though, smells of contrivance and boardroom opportunism. It wastes the talent of its cast. How, you wonder, can a film so expensive seem so cheap?
That's not a charge one could ever level at Satyajit Ray, the great Bengali director, currently the subject of a major retrospective at the National Film Theatre. It covers almost his whole career - the uproarious kids' film The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1960), new prints of such understated gems as Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), his version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1989).
Though he is sometimes perceived as a chronicler of rural peasantry, the range of this season shows us that he was equally acute, often wittily so, in his depictions of modern-day city life and middle-class India.
His films are at all times rooted in precisely-observed communities. Landscapes are rendered tactile. Of crystalline grace, every scene is full of tiny bewitchments and epiphanies. His characters may be poor and withered, but in their dreams - of writing poetry, escaping the slums, getting a better job - their quiet, resourceful dignity is honoured.
"Most stories rehash old stories," says Hari in Pather Panchali. That is something that Satyajit Ray, unlike the makers of Devdas, never did.
DragunR2's Comments
I'm polarized as to whether or not to see Devdas. Some reviews say its all gloss and no substance while others say that it is a good melodrama. That being said, I'm not too gung-ho on seeing it anyways. I bought the soundtrack and enjoy it, but I'd hate to drive 45 minutes or more and spend 3 hours on a movie that is likely to disappoint me.
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Looks like Laura is a better reviewer than Taran Adarsh !
Getting out of focus and very very unsteady. It was basically jumping out of the gate! And I had the unfortunate opportunity of watching Devdas with Bangladeshis, Tamils & Malays. This people were consistently talking away thorough out the film since they don't understand a word of Hindi. But anyway everyone of dumbstruck at the end 
