Bandar

It’s rare for a Hindi filmmaker today to command the calendar Anurag Kashyap has this year: two films—Kennedy and Bandar—arriving months apart, alongside the re-release of Dev.D (2009), the cult film that imprinted his signature on Hindi cinema. It’s a fitting moment to take stock given that Kashyap occupies a complicated place in our cinema. He is among the handful of storytellers who rewired its grammar. Yet, lately his own reputation has begun to precede him. The recent output has been prolific, but also a slow bleed of the edge that once made him essential. Think a boomer cosplaying Gen Z (Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat), or a raconteur sifting through his greatest hits (Nishaanchi).

Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol), a washed-out actor in his 50s, makes a living performing his lone hit song at weddings. Struggling financially and clinging to faded fame, his world comes crashing down when he is arrested on rape charges. The complainant is Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi), a woman he once hooked up with through a dating app. Samar insists he is the real victim, claiming Gayatri is a psychotic stalker seeking revenge after he ghosted and blocked her. The police counter his version by reading out their explicit text exchanges and inform him that he is accused not only of rape, but also extortion and blackmail. Soon, Samar finds himself trapped in judicial custody, with his bail hearing repeatedly delayed and eventually denied owing to the gravity of the allegations. The prison is overcrowded, filthy and hostile, with sexually frustrated rival camps eyeing the “hero” as easy prey. It takes Samar time to realise that this is not a temporary nightmare, he is in for a long and brutal ordeal. Co-directed by Anurag Kashyap, Sakshi Mehta and co-written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, the story appears loosely inspired by the much-publicised case of a television actor-singer accused of rape in 2019.

The protagonist of Bandar, a scrappy and uneven prison drama directed by Anurag Kashyap and written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, learns the hard way that the law is an a** and its victims are monkeys in their own circus. Played by an intense Bobby Deol, the man falls prey to an unrelentingly brutal system that blurs the line between innocence and culpability and makes the process as harrowing as the punishment. Bandar is a grim, frequently confounding portrait of a lawless prison for undertrials that turns the toughest of men into amoral wrecks caught in a distressing struggle for self-preservation and dominance.

In Anurag Kashyap’s Monkey in a Cage (Bandar), provocations arrive early. When a man held in custody is asked to sign papers, he refuses because he cannot read the document. “It’s in Marathi”. The cop’s retort flies back: “If you want to stay in Maharashtra, you have to know Marathi”. Later, there is an elaborate jail song, condemning everything from religion to caste-based divides. Kashyap has been angry for a while. The filmmaker’s rage has been so palpable that it percolates from social media posts to his films. His last couple of original works have been topical indictments — each more incensed than the other, and defined and undone by fury. At this point, his anger is a knotty glaze on his films — impossible to ignore but also distracting. The pattern has been so consistent that baiting seems to be the intent and the whole point. His latest, Monkey in a Cage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a more obvious step towards that direction.