Bandar Movie Review: Anger Mismanagement

Mansplaining finds a landing pad in Bandar, a movie that holds forth on men who are sexually harassed by women. In a case of tone deafness when Twisha Sharma’s case is in the headlines, Bandar focuses on one man’s experience at being wrongly accused of rape by an obsessive woman. Why Bobby Deol’s down-atheel TV actor, Sameer, should attract a pretty young woman from London is a mystery. Especially when she is as beautiful as Sapna Pabbi.

We are given clues in her cutting herself, to show she is unstable—is there any sexually active woman in Mumbai cinema who is not borderline deranged? We are supposed to feel sorry for Sameer as he suffers a series of indignities in prison. Dharam pinjara, jaat pinjara, kitabon mein har baat likhi pinjara (Religion is a cage, so is caste, everything written in the books is a cage too), goes a song in Bandar. A preternaturally calm Indrajith Sukumaran plays a feral prison dada and Deol looks suitably shabby in the role of a fallen star. Resembling an apology for every man ever accused of #MeToo, this film could have been replaced by anger management sessions for Anurag Kashyap.