Anupama Chopra reviews DC, the dense, propulsive Tamil gangster drama written and directed by Arun Matheswaran, who has described his own film as Devdas meets Bonnie and Clyde. The D stands for Devdas and the C for Chandra, and the film opens with a thanks to Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote the novella in 1917 and whose story has been adapted many times over by directors including Bimal Roy, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Anurag Kashyap. Arun reimagines Devdas as a rowdy, a man whose tragic circumstances have turned him into a gangster who loots and kills with impunity, but who will not tolerate anyone disrespecting women and will do whatever it takes to see a young boy get the education he deserves, in a world where most of the other men, many of them cops, are doing far worse. Lokesh Kanagaraj makes his acting debut as Das, with Wamiqa Gabbi as Chandra, the Chandramukhi equivalent, and Sanjana Krishnamoorthy as the singer Parvathy, who stands in for Paro. Anupama calls this an intriguing new take on the 109 year old Devdas story, steered at breakneck speed for the first hour, with Anirudh's pulsating background score working as an additional hero in the film.
Anupama finds that post interval DC becomes more repetitive and sagging, with Arun's striking visual language and Anirudh's music doing the heavy lifting instead of the characters and the script, co-written by Arun with Franklin Jacob and Arun Ranjan. Her central reservation is that the triangle of Devdas, Paro and Chandramukhi and the pairing of Bonnie and Clyde are both throbbing, complex and alive, the spine of their respective stories, while the bond between the deeply damaged Das and Chandra carries much less electricity, so that when the film announces madness meets madness, that unhinged, wounded connection doesn't fully pop. She notes Devdas is a role played by greats including Dilip Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan and Akkineni Nageswara Rao, and that Arun wisely makes his version stoic, a man of few words who expresses himself better with a gun, a character with limited notes that Lokesh makes work and in whose world he looks at home, while Wamiqa Gabbi is terrific, and in the scene where Chandra is deranged by her own suffering Arun keeps Lokesh's back to camera so the focus stays on her. Anupama tracks red as the film's leitmotif, the colour of the rose Chandra puts in her hair before meeting customers, which in a telling exchange she calls plastic like herself, the colour that backgrounds Parvathy when she sings and the colour of the car the gang drives, standing in for danger, death and love all at once, and she flags a kinetic corridor set piece that follows in the footsteps of Oldboy and Animal. The second half gets lost in posturing and its own gorgeous images, though she enjoys Arun's attention to detail, including a darkly funny wedding garland that slowly falls apart. DC has speed breakers but there is enough here to overwhelm your senses, and the film gets tiring without ever getting limp. And that's the THR Bottomline. DC is playing in theatres near you and has been dubbed into Hindi, though Anupama saw the Tamil version with English subtitles.
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