GORE IS A BORE

Babumoshai Bandookbaaz

STARRING: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Bidita Bag, Divya Dutta and Jatin Goswami

DIRECTOR: Kushan Nandy

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There is no polite way of saying this. So let’s just put it straight out. Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a revolting violent piece of cinema, almost sure to make the sensitive squirm, if not throw up.

The body-count and the bawdy encounters are high... so high that you sometimes feel the writer and director pile them on only so we can be shocked out of our senses. But beyond a point, the gore is a bore. And the sex is... yawn. The much-discussed lovemaking between the eager-to-score Nawazuddin and his eager-to-oblige co-star Bidita are as erotic and titillating as two canines on heat, doing it on the road because.... Well, they don’t know any better and can’t wait to get home.

Nawazuddin plays a man who enjoys sex. He copulates with frenzied but mechanical vigour with Bidita and later, much later, with his protege’s girlfriend (Shraddha Das). The women, obviously eager to project rural liberalism, seem willing and eager to have sex anywhere anytime.

This, then is the blueprint of

Kushan Nandy’s wild wild wasteland. Nawazuddin is the assassin on rent who doesn’t think twice before pulling the trigger, as long as he gets paid his price. He performs the killings with rent-card precision and discusses the murder as any professional would discuss his day’s activities.

Manoj Bajpayee got to that level of violent professionalism in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya two decades ago. Nawazuddin, for all his credible crassness, must stop playing depraved morally reprehensible characters who kill and maim with chuckling pleasure. After watching him do it repeatedly, the shock-value of watching the undertrials are introduced to us without fuss or flourish. It’s astonishing how much the two principal debutants blend into the ferociously raw fabric of the storytelling. Both Aadar Jain and Anya Singh are exemplary in their ability to comprehend the sheer desperation of their characters’ predicament. The narrative is huddled and strong. It raises pertinent questions on the issue of freedom and then lapses into a kind of loopy climactic triumph that is purely Utopian.

The young fresh-faced actors convey the anguish of the endless wait for freedom with conviction. Aadar Jain is the clown of the pack, conveying a strong sense of righteousness even when wronged. Aadar reminded me of his grandfather Raj Kapoor. His eyes speak volumes. And Amit Trivedi’s music does the rest.

Anya’s character Bindu remains optimistic till the moment the judge announces her bail at Rs 5 lakh. Her meltdown in the courtroom when the honourable (and frankly weary) judge suggests Vipaasana will convince even the most diehard cynic that Anya is a talent to reckon with.

The other newcomers playing desperate prisoners are also exemplary, especially Mikhail Yawalkar as the poet and family man who waits every month for his wife and daughter’s visit and is crushed like the birthday cake that the wife brings for him, when his daughter refuses to visit.

High praise must also be showered on cinematographer Anay Goswami for bringing to the rust-coloured frames a feeling of arid anxiety. And Trivedi’s music aided by anguished angry barbed lyrics goes a long way into giving this remarkable film a slug at sustained excellence.

Yes, the climax is unrealistic and Sachin Pilgaonkar as the morally compromised jailor is too much Santa and too little Gabbar. But the flaws don’t take away from this film’s long-legged statement on freedom and how much we take it for granted.

Faisal’s film avoids the preachy route. It’s neither a vehicle to launch new talent nor a propaganda piece. Its efficacy is lodged in its sincerity of purpose and an absolute disregard for formulaic tropes and cliches. Qaidi Band is the finest Yash Raj film since Dum Lagake Haisha.

Subhash K Jha

Nawazuddin perpetrate arbitrary violence is long over. In Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, he tackles his raunchy renegade’s character with smugness and boredom. His right-hand man, played by Jatin Goswami, scores merely on novelty. Sorrily, Nawazuddin’s image of the creepy sociopath has reached a saturation point. So has the genre of the gangster drama.

We’ve seen it all in the cinema of Ram Gopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap. Kushan Nandy brings nothing new to the theme. By merely accelerating the violence, murder, mayhem and copulation, the narrative only exposes its own anxious insecurities so clumsily cloaked in random pumping of bullets and other phallic objects.

The violence is bred not from the director’s inner conviction but from the yearning to shock us with groaning, heaving and moaning in bed and in the bloodshed. Midway through the orgy of pogrom targeted alike at debauched victims and good taste, TS Eliot’s words from The Wasteland resonate in Nandy’s own wasteland: Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold... The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.

Too bad we are trapped in this artistic anarchy. Run, while you still have a chance.

Subhash K Jha