Devdas - Tragedy from Shah Rukh Khan?
       

          One person who awaits some magic at the box-office most anxiously is Devdas producer Bharat Shah. Next in line is director Sanjay Leela Bansali and the lead actors Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai. Newspapers are flooded with promotional write-ups and photo features on the most lavishly made Indian movie to date. One need not go over all that stuff once more. Let's confine ourselves to the treatment and performance parts.

           The worst slip is the choice of Shah Rukh as Devdas. Despite his best efforts, he just does not fit the bill. He has never been known as a great tragic actor. In fact, there is none today. Required is a certain effiminate quality or trait in the very nature of the actor. Shahh Rukh has played the obsessive lover or a psychopathic revenge-laced lover's role with negative shades, often violent and fitful.

           The only aspect common between those roles and the present one in Devdas is the self-destructive attitude to the relationship with the woman in question.

Paro is half willing to go along with him and defy the world, but he can't assert himself.           He succumbs to the situation too easily; he lets her slip out of his hand and opts for a life of suffering and pain.           Consequently, Paro and Chandramukhi suffer too.

           What is difficult to swallow is Saratchandra's characterisation of Devdas. The basic question is: How can a youth, educated abroad and exposed to a liberal Western cultural milieu remain totally uninfluenced by it?

-by Our Film Critic
July 12, 2002