The shootouts in Raj Amit Kumar’s Bindiya Ke Bahubali never end. It is what happens between those shootouts that makes the series interesting, at times even more than interesting. Director Amit Kumar’s rugged ode to rowdyism is now streaming on Amazon MX Player.
I am rather tired of seeing Bihar and UP being portrayed as a brutal badland. According to these sagas of savagery about the sagaa (relatives) and the malevolent, every man and many women in rural Bihar owns a gun, and a vocabulary of filthy language to match.
That said, the writing in Bindiya Ke Bahubali is intermittently sparkling, though never quite the outer banks of Wasseypur that they want to be. But how wrong—and for how long?—can the storytelling eschew inspiration amidst all the perspiration in the power play which grips the Bihar hinterland? How wrong can the writing go when actors like Saurabh Shukla and Ranvir Shorey? Kranti Jha, Sushant Singh, and Govind Namdeo occupy screen space with a roar of violent dissent?
The army of women actors, too, is formidable: Seema Biswas, Sheeba Chadha, Sai Tamhankar, Tannishtha Chatterjee …Alas, these women of steel wither in want. Chadha, known to speak her mind, plays a silent lawyer; if that is not a contradiction in terms, what is? She barely has five lines to speak in the entire series, although she plays a lawyer, as the men battle it out on the blood-soaked terrain of rural Bihar, where the only law that prevails is lawlessness. The super-talented Tannishtha plays a role akin to Rasika Duggal in Mirzapur, cringy copulatory overtures with a lout, and all.
An interesting female character is the foreigner drifter Sasha (Kallirroi Tziafeta) who came to India to be Katrina Kaif and ended up as cheap version of Nora Fatehi.
Quite like the series, which is more Wasseypur than Godfather.
Some of the confrontation sequences convey a raw energy missing in many parts of the overloaded litti-chokha western. The gang war located in an imaginary Bihari town called Bindiya (Aur Bandook?) is credible while it lasts. But at the end of the experience, I came away exhausted by the sheer brokenness of the milieu. Everyone except the cop Murali Manjhi (Sushant Singh, unerring in his portrayal and accent) is corrupt, depraved, and greedy.
What happened to the light at the end of the tunnel? Where are the heroes?
