The political angle

Well-known filmmaker Sudhir Mishra’s Daas Dev is the story of a dynast who becomes a slave to his addictions
Sudhir Mishra
Sudhir Mishra

Known for directing critically acclaimed films such as Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Dharavi and Chameli, National Award-winning filmmaker Sudhir Mishra is back with a romantic political thriller, Daas Dev, set to release on March 23.

The multi-starrer film has  Rahul Bhat, Richa Chadha and Aditi Rao Hydari in lead roles, with Saurabh Shukla, Vineet Singh, Anurag Kashyap, Dilip Tahil, and Vipin Sharma playing important parts.
Mishra admits that he has delved into rich literary texts and borrowed from them liberally, but calls the film original because originality doesn’t always mean the content but a person’s take on the subject. “It’s the way we artists look at things that makes it different,” he says.

A still from the movie
A still from the movie

On the choice of subject, he says, “It is my take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas, with liberal borrowing from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To some extent it has also been influenced by my maternal grandfather DP Mishra, who was an influential politician of his times, and who manipulated Mrs Gandhi’s ascent to power.”    

The protagonist Dev (Bhat) is the heir to a political dynasty, who is brought in when the dynasty is under trouble, and Chandni (Hydari) is a character in the political corridors of Delhi, who has the fatal flaw of loving Dev. In Mishra’s film, the context remains the same, but characters are twisted. It is Chandni who retells the story of Dev and his childhood friend and love interest Paro that is intertwined with a political angle; it is her point of view in the epic saga of love, revenge, freedom, and treachery.

Unlike the other two films that are adaptations, Mishra calls Daas Dev a “reimagination of Devdas’s character”. “Dev is a victim of his circumstances and trapped by his birth. The film traces the journey of a dynast who becomes a slave to his addictions, but who rids himself of these ails,” Mishra says.

Making this film was tough for Mishra. He says recounting the challenges: “It is a big film, and to make it with a new, non-star cast and to convince people to put in their money, and then keep it within that budget which is not less but also not huge.”  

Quite excited about the release, he’s busy writing a big historical series, a black satire comedy, and working on the sequel of Hazaroon Khwahishen Aisi these days.

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The New Indian Express
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