Subhash K Jha revisits Kushan Nandy’s Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, which released 8 years ago. And we hear from the director about the film, eight years later.
The body-count and the bawdy encounters are high, so high you sometimes feel the writer and director pile them on(the bangs and the f..ks) only so we can be shocked out of our senses. But beyond a point, the gore is a bore. And the sex is a yawn. The much-discussed lovemaking between the eager-to-score Nawaz and his eager-to-oblige co-star Bidita Bag 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.
Nawaz plays a man who enjoys sex. He copulates with frenzied but mechanical vigour with Bidita and later, much later, with his protégé’s girlfriend (Shradha Das). The women,obviously eager to project rural liberalism, seem willing and eager to have sex anywhere anytime. In one sequence the very accomplished Divya Dutta is on the run from her purported assassin with a compromised burly cop (Bhagwan Tiwari). She abuses him physically and verbally and then lets him ….umm… do pokey-pokey with her.
A little later Divya buried to her neck in a scorpion-infested marshland. This is what happens to bossy over-sex female outlaws.
This, then is the blueprint of Kushan Nandy’s wild wild wasteland. Nawaz 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 Bajpai got to that level of violent professionalism in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya two decades ago. Nawaz for all his credible crassness must stop playing depraved morally reprehensible characters who kills and maims with chuckling pleasure.
Characters are thrown in the simmering cauldron of mofussil carnage randomly to titillate with their cheesy fantasies. A senior gangster(Anil George) likes to watch his naked wife being massaged by a stranger. A mimiddleaged (Bhagwan Tiwari) makes his wife bear broods of sons until she can give him a daughter. The subverted patriarchy of such episodes is lost in the ear-shattering noise decibel generated by the characters self-serving antics.
The soundtrack is as painfully selfconscious as anything else this emasculated emaciated ode to Kashyap and Ritchie has to offer. I caught three songs from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand playing lazily at three different points in the story.It’s all about effect rather than cause.
After watching him do it repeatedly the shock-value of watching Nawaz perpetuate 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, Nawaz’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.
Babumoshai Bandookbaaz attempts to forge a deep bond between physical violence and lawlessness in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh. But the merger of mayhem and luridity never transcends the high-school level of attention-seeking.There isa repeated shot of a young boy riding his mp’bike with his father as pillion.Such visuals are poor compensation for bonafide insight into how gangsterism has evolved since Varma and Kashyap played with the genre.
The most interesting factor among the fractured plot points is the guru-mentor relationship between Nawaz and Goswami. There is a kind of smothered Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid in the way the duo play off against one another. In one sequence after Nawaz’s mistress performs a raunchy dance for him and his pupil , Nawaz in a drunken generous mood, offers to let her have fun with the younger man. It’s a moment that defines the film’s spirit of sustained sensationalism.
The violence is bred not from the director’s inner conviction but from the yearning to shock us with groaning heaving moaning in bed and in the bloodshed. Midway through the orgy of pogrom targeted alike at debauched victims and good taste, T S Elliots words from The Wasteland resonate in Nandy’s own wasteland: things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, a blood-dimmed tide is loosed.
Bidita Bag remembers the uproar over the film’s content. “When this film released, it had mixed reactions and a decent run in cinema halls…It’s fascinating to see over the period of eight years because of social media, this film became a cult product. Scenes are always viral on social media. I got so much recognition and appreciation as Phulwa. My career kickstarted after a long struggle. What I liked the most was the women characters of the film. Initially the female characters appeared to be the oppressed sex objects, but as the story line proceeds they emerged to have a pivotal role in the power game. It is to the credit of the director, writer, actors and the entire crew who carried the film to its culmination. It is also to be mentioned that the then audience enjoyed this dark gangstar genre film with local flavour…which is now a trend on OTT.”
Director Kushan Nandy shared his memories of Babumoshai Bandookbaaz with this writer. “A flood of memories come to me when I remember the film. The energy of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, the surprise factor of Bidita Bag, the ensemble of Jatin Goswami, Divya Dutta and others, the madness of the small towns of Basti and Malihabad. The blood, gore and sex which you would find in a James Hadley Chase book, the hat tip to Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, the dialogues, the visual detailing, it was so much fun. Maybe a sequel? Zee re-released it on YouTube on all their channels. It’s garnered almost three crore views. So there is a huge audience which loves it. I meet so many people, who have watched it and want to see more of that unabashed storytelling. It’s always a pleasure to work with Nawaz. He surprises you when you think you can predict what’s coming up next. So much of craft control! Personally, one of the nicest people to work with.”
