Those who haven’t noticed it as yet: the OTT platform has its own star system now. On the top there is Manoj Bajpayee, Mohit Ahlawat, Vijay Verma, Shefali Shah, Sanya Malhotra.
Just below the above digital superstars, there is a whole group of monstrously talented actors who get neither the recognition nor the pay cheque of the Bajpayee brigade, but are content with the content they get to be part of regularly.
All of those second-tier actors are part of director Amit Kumar’s rugged ode to rowdyism, 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 own 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 outbanks 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, 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, 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.
Some of the confrontation sequences in a recreational resort called Davan Club, where pole dancers do their thing nonstop (would the director please send me the location?), 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?
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