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Release date:
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August 25, 2017
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Director:
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Kushan Nandy
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Cast:
Language:
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Nawazuddin
Siddiqui, Bidita Bag, Jatin Goswami, Shraddha Das, Anil George, Bhagwan
Tiwari, Murli Sharma, Jitu Shivhare, Naveen Tyagi, Divya Dutta
Hindi
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On the face of it, Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a good old
comic crime thriller with more plot twists than the hairpin bends on a mountain
road. Look closer though, and you will see the underlying tragedy in the tale
of Babu Bihari, a hitman who acquires a protégé and gets played even as he
thinks he holds all the cards.
Babu (Nawazuddin
Siddiqui) is a sharpshooter for hire in the interiors of Uttar Pradesh, a man
whose killing skills have earned him a celebrity status of sorts in the
criminal underworld. He is a close associate of the local politician Sumitra
Jiji (Divya Dutta), but switches sides when he receives a high-paying contract
from a rival. While out on the job, Babu’s mission is thwarted by Banke (Jatin
Goswami), a youngster who has been assigned the same contract for reasons
subsequently explained.
Banke is yet to
establish a reputation for himself in the field, but he is cocky and has
obvious potential. His work is managed by his girlfriend, an aspiring actress
called Yasmin (Shraddha Das). Also in the picture are another murky politician,
Dubey (Anil George), and Babu’s fiery lover Phulwa (Bidita Bag), a professional
cobbler with whom he shares a home.
As it happens,
Banke is Babu’s fan. So, they come together for a game of who-kills-who-first.
Obviously nothing
is as straightforward as it seems in this scenario. There are wheels within
wheels in Babu and Banke’s saga, blind alleys where you assume there is a path
ahead and turns where you expect a straight road.
In the end though, Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is about the
pointlessness of violence and the endless cycle of bloodshed that is sparked
off by those who take the law into their own hands. Or, as one marginal
character says in the film, what goes around comes around. This is a theme that
was pushed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s pathbreaking Parinda in Bollywood in 1989 and on which Ram Gopal Varma built an
entire filmography, starting with his Telugu film Siva in the same year. More recently Bollywood kingpin Anurag
Kashyap has visited and revisited this line of thinking in several films. The
highlights of Kushan Nandy’s latest venture – his first after a long break –
are its swag and the two dudes at the centre of the story.
Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is an extremely
gory film, though most of the butchery takes place off screen. Babu and Banke
are what twin Veerus might have been if they were transported from Sholay’s Ramgarh to Jiji’s domain.
They are funny in a
disturbing sort of way. And in the first half, the grimness of their choices is
underlined by the casualness with which they commit murder. The pre-interval
portion is packed like a tiffin box filled to the brim by my indulgent Mum,
making Babumoshai Bandookbaaz a
stylised action flick with equal parts humour and pathos, infused with song and
dance in traditional Bollywood style.
The women in Babumoshai are relentlessly objectified,
but they give as good as they get, with a gaze that is no less lustful than the
no-good men in their lives. They are also nobody’s fools.
Following a very
dramatic moment just before the break, the tone switches completely. The second
half is more intriguing than the first, though it does dip in terms of both
pace and heft. Be that as it may, the film remains enjoyable for the most part.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui
is the lynchpin of the enterprise, delivering a performance in which he somehow
manages to amuse and yet scare the bejeezus out of a viewer. His entry into
crime takes place in circumstances that are mirrored endlessly in the real
world, circumstances that should shame our society but do not.
That said, his Babu
is always entertaining but never a person whose condemnable behaviour is
hero-ised, either by his acting or by Ghalib Asad Bhopali’s writing.
On a superficial
viewing, it might seem that Siddiqui has played this character repeatedly in
the past, and in many ways, Babu does indeed hark back to Faizal Khan in
Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur 1&2.
What worked for me though was the chalk-and-cheese contrast between two
extremely violent, kinky men he has played in quick succession: Babu this year
and the mentally unhinged, impoverished serial killer in Kashyap’s far
superior, sadly unheralded Raman Raghav2.0 from 2016.
The rest of the
cast in Babumoshai Bandookbaaz is a
roll call of fine talents that deserve far more than what Bollywood seems to
have served them so far. The very attractive Jatin Goswami playing the smug
Banke matches his star colleague Siddiqui scene for scene, dialogue for
dialogue, smirk for smirk. Equally oven hot and seemingly effortless in her
spot-on performance is Bidita Bag as Phulwa. The always reliable Divya Dutta as
Sumitra Jiji and Bhagwan Tiwari playing her policeman sidekick Tarashankar lend
an unexpected comicality to their performances in one of the film’s darkest
scenes on a lonely country road surrounded by fields.
The weakness of the
second half comes from the feeling that plot points are being introduced one
after the other merely to surprise, without a sufficient exploration of the
motivations and deceptions of several characters. The result is that while the
film remains engaging throughout, it is hard to ignore the post-interval lack
of substance.
To say that it
completely lacks depth would be unfair though. The quiet insertion of a famous
melody I shall not name here while the end credits roll, for instance, comes
across as a deliberate act of subversion. And the Babu-Phulwa-Banke dynamic is
interesting, to say the least.
Besides, Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, flawed though it
is, comes as manna to a starving film buff in what must certainly be the worst
year for Bollywood in the decade so far. It could have been better, of course,
but it is fun enough to be forgiven its follies and indulgences.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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A
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Running time:
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122 minutes 39 seconds
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
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