Devdas

Devdas (2002) is a sweeping Indian melodrama from director Sanjay Leela Bhansali that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Madhuri Dixit. Running nearly three hours, it adapts Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay's early-20th-century novel about a man destroyed by a love he cannot keep and cannot leave behind.

Devdas Mukherjee and Paro grew up together in a village outside Calcutta, inseparable since childhood. Their families' rigid class divide ends that story before it begins. Paro is married off to a wealthy widower. Devdas spirals into alcohol and finds himself drawn to Chandramukhi, a courtesan who gives him warmth with no expectation of return — the one relationship in his life that asks nothing of him. The film holds both women with equal care: Aishwarya Rai plays Paro's fierce, unrequited devotion, while Madhuri Dixit's Chandramukhi is the film's quiet emotional center.

Bhansali turned the production into something close to a visual ceremony — elaborate palace sets, layered costumes, and Ismail Darbar's score that lodges itself in your memory. The film took eight National Film Awards in India. Stream Devdas (2002) on iFILM.