‘Bandar’ movie review: Inside Anurag Kashyap’s mirrorless cage

Almost two decades after Dev.D , Anurag Kashyap returns to conduct another autopsy of male entitlement, but in the post-#MeToo space, he has a far more treacherous, shifting terrain to navigate. The filmmaker’s cinematic identity is built on a refusal to provide clean moral answers, and Bandar initially promises to be his ultimate playground of gray before it stagnates. Samar Mehra ( Bobby Deol ), a fading, entitled television star, has his life systematically dismantled when his ex-girlfriend Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi) hits him with a rape accusation. Anurag, along with screenwriters Sudeep Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, makes the audience sit with an agonising double vision, trapped between a deeply flawed, hollowed-out man-child and an erratic, unpredictable accuser. He denies the audience a clear hero to root for or a definitive villain to despise. The policeman invokes Bachchan to remind Samar, ‘no means no,’ but there is no one to tell Gayatri the boundaries of a consensual relationship. The film touches on humanity’s status between left- and right-swipes. When policemen cover his face to save him from the marauding media, Samar’s claustrophobic mind goes to the moment when he casually demanded to choke Gayatri for momentary physical pleasure.