Bandar

Anurag Kashyap’s Bandar is set in a fascinating world. An out-of-work actor Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol), 50, a shadow of his ‘90s screen-self, has to perform his one-hit wonder at tacky weddings to pay the bills. When he exits the airport and sees his more famous colleagues (cameos by Sunny Leone and husband Daniel Weber) getting ‘papped’, he takes out his phone and takes a selfie of his tired face, to humble-brag on social media. He’s behind on his EMIs; his domestic help, Shiva, hasn’t been paid in four months. Even as he carries a constant back pain, Samar is unapologetic about his carnal desires, dabbling in problematic pornography and scrolling through profiles of significantly younger women, as if to suggest a sexual preference. He’s also petty and territorial, something we find out during a conversation with girlfriend, Khushi (Saba Azad), when he expresses displeasure after she went out with a group of friends the night before. All in all, where protagonists are usually air-brushed, Samar is a grimy, authentic everyman, comfortably placed in his contradictions, unserious world-view and profound vanity.

If Anurag Kashyap had, by some cosmic clerical error, wandered into academia instead of cinema, he might well have become a tenured authority on the anthropology of crime—specifically, the sort that festers in dimly lit alleys and moral grey zones. His fascination with transgression is neither new nor unwelcome; after all, crime, in fiction as in life, offers a perverse kind of narrative seduction. One is drawn not merely to the act itself but to the elaborate theatre of law enforcement—those who prosecute, persecute, or, on less scrupulous days, politely protect the very rot they are sworn to excise. What grows wearisome, however, is Kashyap’s stubborn fidelity to the same old gangland grammar: interchangeable criminals, cut from identical cloth, trading smug one-liners like bored schoolboys passing notes in class. Variety, it seems, has been quietly smothered somewhere between the first act and the last cigarette.

Almost two decades after Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap returns to conduct another autopsy of male entitlement, but in the post-#MeToo space, he has a far more treacherous, shifting terrain to navigate. The filmmaker’s cinematic identity is built on a refusal to provide clean moral answers, and Bandar initially promises to be his ultimate playground of gray before it stagnates. Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol), a fading, entitled television star, has his life systematically dismantled when his ex-girlfriend Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi) hits him with a rape accusation. Anurag, along with screenwriters Sudeep Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, makes the audience sit with an agonising double vision, trapped between a deeply flawed, hollowed-out man-child and an erratic, unpredictable accuser. He denies the audience a clear hero to root for or a definitive villain to despise. The policeman invokes Bachchan to remind Samar, ‘no means no,’ but there is no one to tell Gayatri the boundaries of a consensual relationship. The film touches on humanity’s status between left- and right-swipes. When policemen cover his face to save him from the marauding media, Samar’s claustrophobic mind goes to the moment when he casually demanded to choke Gayatri for momentary physical pleasure.

First and foremost, it’s great that Anurag Kashyap is back directing a film. Kashyap has, in the past, delivered some of the most iconic films of our time, which have been lauded for being gritty and real. The man has, in the last few years, forayed into acting (he is earning praises in that department, too) and has publicly admitted that he is disillusioned with Bollywood and its ways. Which is why his latest directorial venture, Bandar, featuring Bobby Deol in the lead, is a special film. The film has been written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, the men behind web series like Pataal Lok 2 and Kohhra. Expectations, thus, were high from Bandar. But does it live up to those expectations? Here’s what I thought.

Samar Mehra is not a has-been actor. His career never took off and at 50, acting opportunities have shrunk considerably, and so have his relationship prospects. Samar — played by an almost opaque Bobby Deol, a necessity for the part and not an encumbrance — sustains by lip-syncing to his old hits (C’mon baby, with him looking like a shiny disco ball, is addictive) at weddings and entertains himself by being on a dating app. His rent is overdue, so is surgery for a bad back. Unmarried, his current on-off date is Khushi (a refreshing Saba Azad). Cynical and exhausted, one night Samar finds his life upended when cops unceremoniously land up and herd him off to jail. A disbelieving and distraught Samar learns that he has been accused of rape by Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi), a woman he claims he had right-swiped on, got intimate with a few times and ghosted when she got obsessive. But in a post #MeToo society skewed against the man in such cases — “I am a victim,” Samar laments. “You are the accused until proven innocent,” his lawyer (Riddhi Sen is solidly cast) says bluntly — he finds that the stakes are heavily stacked against him.

Right up, the first person to compliment would be Bobby Deol for playing a washed-up entertainer. It’s not every day that a mainstream actor would play Samar Mehra, a 50+ loser with a somewhat loose abs to match and outstanding EMIs. Man Friday too hasn’t been paid for months. No wife, no marriage, girlfriend Khushi (Saba Azad) was found on a dating app. But hopes of the big break as hero linger, as it does in most actors. And then he’s hit with a rape charge by Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi), a stalker from his recent past. The rawness and the indifference of cops inside a police station may have been seen several times before but Kashyap directs a sequence that’s part humour, part horror especially as a senior in charge (brilliantly played by Jitendra Joshi) takes off on Samar’s WhatsApp chats. His ‘Benjo…’, his way-out explanations, his Trimurti reference to Subhash Ghai, are so well-written and well-enacted that there’s laughter even as the noose tightens around Samar.

Do you ever think of being correct, but not politically correct? That is, saying something aloud through any medium that might offend the majority despite being right in your stand. Anurag Kashyap’s Bandar spends its entire 2-hour odd runtime walking this dangerously slippery slope. It tells the story of a man wronged in the era of #MeToo, a movement that has rightfully brought justice to a lifetime of denial for countless survivors. The gender reversal makes the story a tad uncomfortable to endorse, though never difficult to empathize with.