The 10 greatest movies of the millennium

Il 15 maggio 2012 Time ha pubblicato la lista dei dieci film più grandiosi distribuiti a partire dall'anno 2000. Devdas occupa l'ottava posizione.

The 10 greatest movies of the millennium (thus far), Richard Corliss:

'A year after Moulin Rouge! had its world premiere at Cannes, another visually intoxicating musical opened at the festival, introducing sang-and-danced Bollywood dramas to the international culturati. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s (...) novel inspired at least a half-dozen film versions before this one - in its time, the priciest movie in Indian history (at about $ 10.6 million). The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-ol’ family-values propaganda, drenched in luscious masochism: rich-boy Devdas (all-world charismatist Shahrukh Khan) leaves home, abandons his girlfriend (former Miss World Aishwarya Rai) and suffers magnificently while dallying with a prostitute (Madhuri Dixit, a hot number who had danced flamenco on men’s libidos for a decade or so before appearing in this worldly-wise role). The piece is played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing - and dancing to, in nine nifty production numbers. But the fervid emotion is what makes the thing sing. Beyond that, Devdas is a visual ravishment, with sumptuous sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved'.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: The Dialogue of Devdas - Bimal Roy's immortal classic

Vi segnalo la recensione del volume The Dialogue of Devdas - Bimal Roy's immortal classic a cura di Nasreen Munni Kabir. La recensione è firmata da Shohini Ghosh, e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 9 marzo 2012. Di seguito un estratto: 

'Writing about Devdas in 1991, film critic Chidananda Dasgupta wrote: “Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote this novel at the age of 17. It is surprising that this immature piece of fiction should have created such an archetypal hero, a romantic self-indulgent weakling who finds solace in drink and the bosom of a golden-hearted prostitute.” This view of Devdas is fairly common so what explains the popularity of this character who, over the last nine decades, has been repeatedly invoked through cinematic re-makes? The Dialogue of Devdas based on Bimal Roy’s 1955 classic allows the cinephile to return to the film and ponder these questions one more time. (...)

The screenplay of Devdas is authored by Nabendu Ghosh, an acclaimed and prolific Bengali writer who wrote many screenplays for Hindi films. The dialogue is written by famous Urdu Progressive writer Rajinder Singh Bedi (...) and lyrics by the talented Sahir Ludhianvi. (...) Dilip Kumar who played Devdas in Bimal Roy’s version (...) writes that Bedi’s “syntax was so perfect” that even the simplest lines “inspired actors to build deep emotions in their rendering.”

The dialogue of Hindi films have a life of their own that spill over onto ours. (...) For many of us who grew up in states (in my case, West Bengal) hostile to the forcible imposition of Hindi as a national language, it was Bombay cinema that triumphed where government diktats failed. The elegant Hindustani of Hindi films was more alluring than the klutzy sanskritised words that masqueraded as the national language. The Dialogue books bear witness to how the language spoken in these iconic films remains indebted to the rich legacy of Urdu. Devdas stands as a splendid inter-text constituted as much by its literary source as its many cinematic versions'.