From Bhansali’s adaptation of Devdas’ story – a process of extraction, elaboration, exaggeration, and ultimately exploration – we can understand the impulse of his cinema. Watching the film alongside its previous adaptations, seeing the spaces of emphasis, of retreating, of fabulation – not only in the performances which are pitched a few thousand storeys higher, but also the circumstances – you can recognize what it is that Bhansali finds exciting and cinematic, and why it is that he was drawn to this story.
In Bimal Roy’s version, Devdas walks into Chandramukhi’s kotha the moment Paro walks into her marriage palanquin as parallel lunges of the respective bodies; Devdas is elsewhere. But Bhansali keeps Devdas close by, making his shoulder one of the many on which Paro’s palanquin rests, giving their farewell this bleeding polish.
To see how Bhansali adapts Devdas is to see what it is about the story that attracted him to it. Bimal Roy’s film is fairly straightforward. Devdas’ mother rejects Paro’s proposal entirely off-screen; this rejection is perfunctorily mentioned in a conversation between Devdas’ parents. But when Bhansali hears about this exchange, he recognizes the potential for not just drama, but drama as expressed through musical howls and dramatic distortion – his answer to the singular question of how to infuse beauty into the story.
He concocts an elaborate scene. One where Paro’s mother dances at Devdas’s house to celebrate a child to be born in that house, followed by her proposal and its violent, dramatic, shattering rejection—a plate of vermilion, with a lamp, tossed away – which allows for one of the most poignant and melodramatic confrontations of Bhansali’s filmography, where Paro’s mother, humiliated, promises, in front of the thronging, spectatorial crowds, to have her daughter married to a house of higher station.
A public rupture of dignity, a public show of courage, a public display of grace – these are moments Bhansali cannot resist. It allows for shame, and for power to cut through that shame and assert itself in an immediate, articulate, and cinematically satisfying way.
Bhansali intercuts this public theatre with a private one, with Paro and Devdas romancing by the moonlit waterfall, though romance is a light word for what is happening. As they walk across grass, Paro’s feet are punctured by a thorn, her sole bleeding. As she reaches out to pluck it from her skin – bending her knees backwards and twisting her body to reach out – Devdas swats her hands. That only he has the right to draw blood from her, such is his grotesque, total sense of ownership. This is sex, make no mistake of the penetrative thorn’s presence. This is domination. He unplucks the thorn and kisses the wound as Paro is balancing a pot of water on her head.
What Bhansali has done is elaborate the story, introduce characters bursting with intention – like Paro’s mother, Devdas’ mother –who were left hazily sketched in a previous iteration. Bimal Roy’s storytelling is more focused, in that sense. It isn’t even interested in establishing the love between Devdas and Paro as much as it is in establishing its violence.
Bhansali wants us to see the love in the violence, the beating heart in the grasping hand. Bhansali’s Devdas is far more in love with Paro. Or at least his possessiveness is far more grounded in what he calls love.
So, while Roy spends a longer time luxuriating in Devdas and Paro’s childhood, Bhansali keeps them as peripheral jots, quick, efficient flashbacks – efficient, a word you would never otherwise use to describe Bhansali’s art. There is no drama there to milk except that of Paro seeing Devdas leave. Roy uses baul music to verbalize what is happening in the heart of young Paro. Bhansali prefers his characters to do that themselves.
Even a small gesture in Roy’s film – Paro and Chandramukhi passing each other, for example – is in Bhansali’s hands an enormous patch of mud that he sculpts into one song, one confrontation, and one moment of feminine companionship. He also bestows a distinct materiality to the film – concrete to Devdas, glass to Paro, mirrors to Chandramukhi.
Bhansali couldn’t care less for literary accuracy. He barely thinks of historic accuracy, the way he made Kashibai (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mastani (Deepika Padukone – the two lovers of Bajirao, the eighteenth century Maratha Peshwa, who according to historic records never met – meet, feud, dance, and dulcet in Bajirao Mastani.
Bhansali is interested in something beyond ‘truth’ or ‘authenticity’, he is instead chasing both nostalgia and mythology. It is the devotion with which Paro holds Devdas’ love over the years that he is fascinated by. He uses the lamp which she keeps lit in his memory as that symbol. It’s grand and beautiful, amenable to music, drama, and dialogue.
This is because, based on his interviews, he sees in Devdas a reflection of his father – Navin Bhansali, who drowned in debt and alcohol after losing all his money on the few B-grade films he produced, like Jahazi Lootera (1953). Every Bhansali film is an offering to his father, each film beginning with a dedication to him, but Devdas especially so. It is almost pathetic, poignant, this pleading for his affection. (Jahazi Lootera even gets a shoutout in Gangubai Kathiawadi, where a poster of it is seen outside the theatre in the film, set in the 1950s.)
In Bhansali’s narration of his life, his mercurial father, who died of cirrhosis, in his final moments came out of his coma and extended his hand towards his mother, a gesture that Devdas, too, performs in his final moments in the film, at the entrance of Paro’s marital home. Trauma became grist in Bhansali’s hands. He would, in interviews promoting his films, invoke his life.
Excerpted with permission from On Beauty – The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Prathyush Parasuraman, Penguin Random House.