With Bandar, Anurag Kashyap has created his most cynical and pessimistic film yet. It is a Kafkaesque nightmare dressed up as a prison drama, a film that is relentless in its vision of an unforgiving arbitrary world. The film centers around Samar Mehra, a washed-up middle-aged TV star struggling to make ends meet, doing odd shows here and there to keep himself afloat. He is living off of his past glory, passing by in a world that does not recognize him anymore.
When he performs his hands do not even pretend to play the guitar, and from a distance he looks like a man who is unbothered and on the edge of giving up. Samar’s world is turned upside down when he is arrested by the police in the middle of the night after an FIR has been filed against him, very reminiscent of Kafa’s novel The Trial where the protagonist Josef K is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority. While the nature of the accused crime is not revealed in The Trial, Mehra is shown to be accused of rape by Gayatri, an ex who refuses to let go.
Bobby Deol plays Samar Mehra, a washed up actorKafka has always captured Kashyap’s imagination, revealing in an interview with Samdish Bhatia that reading Kafka opened up a whole new world for him and sent him on a journey of self discovery, his films have often contained characters that have been the subject of cruel and unjust circumstances – No Smoking being the prime example, with its protagonist literally called K.
In both The Trial and Bandar, we have protagonists who are trapped in systems that they do not fully comprehend.
A Critique of Bureaucracy and its hypocrisies
Kashyap’s pointed critique of the bureaucracy lies in the fact that he implies that the process itself is unforgiving, the process itself is the punishment. The film painfully reveals the elongated and tedious process of the justice system, towards people who are not yet proven to be guilty. Dates are postponed, bribes are demanded and there is a surface revelation of the system’s corruption. What makes this critique more pointed is that the system scrutinizes the songs that Mehra performs, the lifestyle that Mehra leads and the kind of morality that it leads to. The system constantly whines about this perceived moral degeneration and places itself on a pedestal. While Mehra is being taken away in a police car, one of the police officers starts watching one of Mehra’s old songs and then complains about the vulgarity in it. After he is taken to the police station and his phone and wallet snatched away, all the police officers go through his internet history and discover his porn watching habits. Mehra is humiliated again and again, with no air of objectivity.
After Mehra is accused and his lawyer meets with the judge to ask for a trial, the Judge bursts into a rage, ranting about the depraved lifestyle that these Bollywood stars lead, referring to the rampant presence of drugs and sex in their lives. Mehra is deemed as a moral threat to society, with the judge asking what kind of influence this will have on society. There is an explicit hypocrisy at play here, the hypocrisy of institutions that preaches virtue while blatantly indulging in corruption. It preaches constantly about moral degeneration while being indifferent to the practice of actual justice. For the system, the accusation itself serves as an indicator of your morality.
The false accusation as existential horror
The false accusation arc seems to me to be the most provocative aspect of the film, with many people deeming it to be some kind of incel propaganda. The truth seems to be more complicated than that – while the film is interested in whether the accusations are true or false and of conflicting subjective narratives, its main focus lies in the social stigma that comes with being even accused or associated with such a heinous crime. Even while in prison, Mehra is asked to not reveal the nature of his accusation because he is told that even the prisoners do not take lightly to people accused of sexual crimes, he lies about being put in prison for murder instead, and thinks of murder as a more honourable crime.
It feels like an existential horror dawning upon Mehra – as sexually assaulting a woman is the worst thing that you can be accused of in society, and brings more notoriety than even murder. There is an inhumanity to a sexual crime that feels more violating to human dignity than murder. Mehra is therefore accused of the worst crime possible, because of which one already becomes a perceived criminal in the eyes of everyone else.
It does not therefore, seem to me to be an incel narrative about men being victimized by women but rather explores a more fundamental human terror (which in the case of a man manifests in such an accusation) – the fear of being judged, condemned, and socially destroyed before any fair process has taken place.
Rebellion and eventual submission
Like most of Kashyap’s protagonists, Mehra rejects these accusations immediately and vehemently and tries to fight against this huge, relentless and moralistic bureaucracy – a theme that often recurs in Kashyap’s films such as No Smoking, Ugly and Black Friday. Samar Mehra’s resistance is ultimately worn down in the prison, when he sees people like himself who are constantly trying to prove to others of their innocence. He sees many others accused of rape, who desperately plead to him about their innocence. Seeing this, Mehra starts questioning his own reality, wondering whether his innocence is even genuine.
Here we see the bureaucracy successfully breaking down the Mehra’s spirit. In the beginning of the film, Mehra keeps on cleaning his teeth and his fangs, a sign that he still cares. By the end of the film, we see him lose his fangs while having stale prison food, this marks as a symbolic submission to the system, a break-down of his spirit. Mehra is overcome with a kind of acceptance and looks defeated by the end. When Mehra finally loses his fangs, the defeat is not merely personal. It resembles Kashyap’s own movement from rage towards resignation.
Bandar as Kashyap’s self portrait
This is Kashyap reflecting on his own career. Bobby Deol’s Samar Mehra is Kashyap himself: a somewhat washed up star who will not compromise on certain things such as his pride. An unfair system forces him to conform to the great equalizers of society, being judged before any sort of fair assessment.
Kashyap has often talked about the long and arduous process of getting his first film released. Paanch, Kashyap’s first film was his directorial debut and was blocked by the censor board because of its violence, drug use, foul language, and generally dark tone. Kashyap has later said that this censorship battle had effectively stalled his career for years. It was prevented from reaching the audience in the first place.
His second film Black Friday dealt with the 1993 Bombay blasts. A legal petition by the accused individuals led to a stay order. The release of the film was blocked until the court case concluded because the court felt that the film might affect the proceedings. It only reached audiences years later after lengthy legal delays. His second film, therefore, was also effectively suppressed by forces outside his control.
Kashyap has always been public about his frustrations with the industryKashyap’s battles with the censor board and the bureaucracy are stuff of legends. He comments on being frustrated and angry while all of this was happening and even considered quitting several times. It was only much later that he came to terms with the reality of the industry. No Smoking, released in 2007, was the first film of his that actually reached theatres without years of delay.
Kashyap was ultimately so frustrated that he had decided to make a film that would be entirely allegorical, a film that would get over the heads of the censor boards by being a parable of his fight against censorship and it worked. The irony of all this was that Kashyap’s most direct attack on the censor board ended up being released immediately because it was marketed as an anti-smoking film.
We see, therefore, Kashyap’s history with authorities and his fight to not compromise on his vision. Bandar represents all of this pent up frustration and humiliation that he has had to face over all of these years, the frustration of fighting a larger than life entity, the humiliation of being forced to accept judgments from people you know to be corrupt, of being lectured to. There is a song that plays when Bobby Deol is stuck in prison called Pinjara and its lyrics are telling – “desh pinjra, samaaj pinjra, pichwaare mein ghusa hua riwaz pinjra” – the country a prison, society a prison, the traditions stuck up our asses a prison.
Pinjara | BANDAR |
Bandar’s final thesis is that injustice is not exceptional, Samar Mehra is one of thousands who think they are innocents. The innocence may not even matter and the resistance may not liberate. A resigned acceptance might be the only path to sanity. Its bleakest conclusion is that unfairness is not an oddity but an inherent feature of existence. It is life itself that is the prison.
