When was the last time the hero in an Indian commercial film was introduced without any fanfare? Deva opens with downbeat credits composed of fractured surveillance images. And then its titular character just appears, riding his bike down a tunnel. No buildup. No flying bodies. No ‘Sparkling Star Shahid Kapoor’.
Ten minutes later, Kapoor is, in effect, reintroduced: there are sundry hero shenanigans and a dance number. But the opening is enough to guess that this is a rare contemporary Hindi commercial film whose rhythms aren’t those of Tamil or Telugu cinema. Then again, its hurt, sombre rhythms aren't classic Bollywood either—despite Dev being positioned before a mural of Deewaar while ‘Main Hoon Don’ plays.
Dev (Shahid Kapoor) is a renegade cop with the Mumbai police, trigger-happy, sadistic, happy to summarily execute and call it self-defence later. This kind of bad lieutenant is par for the course in Hindi film, and Kapoor is better than most at playing agitated men on a mission. But he’s really playing two Devs. In the opening scene, we see him crash in the tunnel just after he tells his superior Farhan (Pravesh Rana) that he knows who the killer is. When he comes to, he has no memory of who he is, or the murder he was trying to solve.
The amnesia version of Dev is as subdued as the earlier one is excitable. This puts the film in a curious spot. The first half is mostly a flashback featuring pre-accident Dev, sold by Kapoor’s dirtbag energy. But after the intermission, the film operates more like a dour thriller, with Dev stumbling, Memento-style, towards some understanding of what happened. His shattered self is sometimes moving, like when he’s shown a video of himself pulling a gun on the wife of a suspect. But the film needs whacko Shahid to keep itself engaging, and that is only available in intermittent flashbacks.
All this back and forth pays off in a genuinely surprising twist, which has the ring of emotional truth if not cold logic. The key to the film is a charged scene between Dev and his close friend and fellow cop Roshan (Pavail Gulati). Roshan, from a wealthy family, argues for conscience and the importance of family. Dev, who grew up poor, whose father was a drunk and a criminal, dismisses talk of duty and honour as the privilege of the rich. A week after Deewaar turns 50, this is an ingenious reframing of that famous scene under the bridge.
Rosshan Andrrews has been working as a director in Malayalam cinema since 2005. You can see the methodical, procedural tendencies of that industry, and its pared-back approach to action, in his first Hindi film. The fights in Deva are quick and brutally efficient; I only noticed one prominent use of slo-mo. This is also a film interested in Mumbai as a city, both thematically, in its inclusion of various communities and subcultures, and visually. Cinematographer Amit Roy, who cut his teeth on Ram Gopal Varma productions, has a good eye—the chase scene by the sea is particularly fetching, hurtling figures against a backdrop of boats, flotsam and flapping sheets.
Deva is a remake of Andrrews’ own Mumbai Police (2013), which featured Prithviraj Sukumaran in the Kapoor role. That film turns on an interesting secret—a gay relationship. Whether it’s because the makers felt they couldn’t repeat the same trick or because they thought Hindi audiences wouldn’t be as accepting, this revelation is changed to something more generic in Deva. It works, but it isn’t memorable.
Homosexuality may have been dropped, but this is very much a film about male bonds, between Dev and Roshan, and Farhan and Dev. Pooja Hegde plays a crime reporter who grows close to Dev. It’s not hard to imagine the film with her part excised; there’s more chemistry between Kapoor and Upendra Limaye in a riotous one-scene cameo as a sharpshooter brought in to advise the police.
Like most cop films, Deva establishes a link between selective brutality and credible leads (even if it places several of its characters in opposition to this). But it also suggests, more obliquely, anxieties about the surveillance state. Information-gathering drones feature in multiple scenes; call records and conversations are pulled up with ease. Dev carries within him the anger of the working class, but without the righteousness that often accompanies such characterisations. All of this makes for an off-kilter film, more sobering than thrilling.
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