Today I am planning to see “Dev.D,” a modern-day retelling of the 1917 novella Devdas by Sharat Chandra Chatterji, at the Minneapolis St Paul Asian Film Festival.
This will not be my first experience with Devdas, Paro, and Chandramukhi.
The very first Bollywood film I ever watched was the 2002 version of “Devdas.” The costumes and sets are stunningly beautiful, the music is lush, the dancing is amazing, and it is most certainly not for the faint of heart–overwrought is a fairly accurate description. (I still kind of love it though.) It was shown at Cannes, and was India’s entry to the Oscars that year. (And I really wouldn’t recommend that as your first Bollywood film, unless you already know you’re going to love them.)
Because I knew the film was based on a novella, and because I had heard that the original story was quite different than the film, I requested Devdas through inter-library loan a few years ago. I ended up reading two different translations; the first one was not very good, and the second one was much better. Alas, I cannot remember which was which.
Someday I want to see the 1936 and the 1955 Hindi film versions; there are also several other versions in Bengali and Tamil. (It’s a very popular story in India, if you hadn’t guessed.) I am curious to see how the story has evolved as it has been retold so many times. Chunnilal, for example, is a real jerk in the novella, but has transformed into a lovable rogue by the time of the 2002 film. How is he portrayed in the earlier films? What else has been added or removed or embellished?
For more information about the various Hindi iterations, see this article. It does lay out the entire plot of the story, so beware.
[…] adaptation of the Devdas story it worked amazingly well. Rather than recap the whole thing (see my earlier post for that), I’ll mention what I found especially […]