'Bandar' review: Anurag Kashyap's new film, written by 'Paatal Lok' writers Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, is one of the best prison dramas ever made

Last night, after watching "Bandar" and reaching the Metro station, the clock showed it would take 14 minutes for the train to arrive. This information, the heavy rain, and the huge crowd gathering at the station for the same train began to irk me. But then a voice inside me suddenly told me, "Dude, you just saw Bobby Deol being put through a hellish nightmare for nearly two hours. Is your situation as bad as his?" And suddenly I began to feel better about my situation.

It's the morning now, and some of the unpleasant images in "Bandar" haven't completely left me. Anurag Kashyap's new film is his best in a long time. I'm not saying "Nishaanchi" (both parts together are better) or "Kennedy" was bad, but "Bandar" feels like a return to the vintage Kashyap — the "Black Friday" and "Ugly" era, to be specific. There are scenes in "Bandar" that feel like extensions of some of the scenes in those two films — the procedural aspects, the long interrogation scenes...

This film is the antithesis of the Bollywood movie with the foreign locales and the bikini scenes (the new Varun Dhawan movie, which released alongside, is just that). So if you're looking for the latter, don't watch "Bandar" because it's not a picnic; it's a nearly two-hour tour of a prison cell. And Kashyap doesn't shy away from showing every unpleasant aspect of it.

In this script penned by "Paatal Lok" writers Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, Bobby Deol plays a "has-been" celebrity accused of rape. His world was already quite dark: he is penniless, suffers from back pain and relationship-related insecurity. He is a 50-year-old dating a woman 15 years younger (Saba Azad). But she is not the one who will accuse him of rape. It's an ex. Whether he did or not is for the audience to find out and discuss.

Kashyap and his writers show what happened through flashbacks that run concurrently with the present. The screenplay does something clever with the timelines. It opens with a police chase reminiscent of the one in "Black Friday" and "Gangs of Wasseypur"; it feels like a separate incident disconnected from the events that follow, but we later learn that there is indeed a connection.

Long story short, Kashyap puts his "hero" and us through an uncomfortable (in a good way) ordeal. And Deol puts his heart and soul into conveying the exasperation and despair of a man slowly made aware of the hard-hitting reality that surviving his Kafka-esque situation may not be as easy as it sounds. First of all, he happens to be broke even though he comes from a privileged background. We get hints of how that happened.

In a darkly comic (for me) scene, we are told that his ex, Gayatri (an excellent Sapna Pabbi evoking Glenn Close from "Fatal Attraction"), made him pay 15 lakhs for an "energy-healing" procedure in his home, and you start reflecting on the absurdity of it all. If Samar had saved that money, his current situation would've been relatively better. However, we doubt it. Samar isn't portrayed as a saint. We are constantly told that Samar "lives in a bubble", through his concerned sister (Sanya Malhotra on fire!) and her lawyer friend, who is irate at the fact that Samar hasn't shared with him the complete story.

In terms of its harrowingly realistic depiction of prison life, the complex individuals and the gangs within its overcrowded cells, corrupt cops, and an unfair justice system, "Bandar" makes no compromises. Every ugly detail is shown as it is, sometimes as a blur in the background, which makes it even more unsettling. It has images that give you the urge to puke or look away, thanks to the excellent production design — wait a minute, this must be a real prison, right? — and the performances of all the actors involved.

Aside from Deol, we get riveting turns from Malayalam actor Indrajith Sukumaran, who plays a Malayalam-Hindi-speaking convict named Lijo (possibly named after Kashyap's filmmaker dost who made "Angamaly Diares", and who appeared in a small silent cameo at the beginning of "Nishaanchi") and the maverick Kannada star (and filmmaker) Raj B Shetty, among many others who contribute to an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere.  

In this regard, "Bandar" can be compared to the Iranian film "Just 6.5", with its similar prison life depiction, which depicted moral complexities of a different kind. Kashyap's film is not trying to be one-sided with its storytelling — after all, there exist women who make false allegations that hurt the credibility of the genuine survivors. I liked how the film explores the idea of perceptions interfering with judgment. In one scene, a judge refuses to listen to his junior, who says that everyone in India is "sexually repressed." Furious, the older man tells him that such transgressions are confined to only the "film people" and begins lecturing about the country's "culture" and "values." The film also teases the possibility that we may be seeing events from Samar's eyes, and things could be even more complicated than it already is.

And we get scenes where some convicts, who claim to be falsely accused of the same crime as Samar, think and speak about women in a way that's not different from what free men think and do in the outside world. It's as though "Bandar" is holding up a mirror and asking every man, "If you're even thinking like these convicts, are you any different?" The film, more than anything else, is a cautionary tale. The message seems to be this: “If you do something wrong, this is what will happen to you. And even if you didn’t do something wrong, but made some poor life choices that led you to this situation, it could get even worse. Basically, mind your own business and don’t be like Samar.”

Film: Bandar
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Bobby Deol, Indrajith Sukumaran, Saba Azad, Sapna Pabbi, Sanya Malhotra, Raj B. Shetty, Sukant Goel, Jitendra Joshi
Rating: 5/5