Bandar irony: Bobby Deol's career-best role comes in a film no one's looking at
In Bandar, Bobby Deol sheds familiar glamour to get into the skin of a role destined to highlight his career. The problem: Anurag Kashyap's grim film is yet to get people talking.
Bobby Deol has just given the performance of his life in a film no one is talking about. The irony could mark the biggest recall of Anurag Kashyap's Bandar someday.
Bandar is far removed from the larger audience's idea of a movie outing, especially the fan base that sustains a mainstream career as Bobby Deol's. It explains the lukewarm response, but then Kashyap's films never promise box office fireworks. What's more, with Bandar, Deol has actually landed a screenplay where the familiar Anurag Kashyap idiom of discomfort is amped several notches. That's a grim challenge for any actor.
Deol plays Samar Mehra, a faded pop singer whose claim to fame is a single hit he belted out years ago. The crowds are long gone, the phone barely rings. The pride still survives, but only just.
For an apt casting, Kashyap perhaps didn't have to look far. Watching Bandar, it is impossible not to recall Bobby Deol's confessions in various interviews, about the years when work eluded him, and he found himself trapped in self-doubt and alcoholism. Deol, you'd think, probably lived through a version of Samar's despair.
Becoming Samar on screen, however, would be the easy part of a demanding role for Deol. The real challenge would have started when Samar's life veers away into a nightmare zone that Bobby Deol, Bollywood star, would have had no first-hand knowledge of.
(Spoiler begins)
One night, the police arrive at Samar’s doorstep: An FIR has been filed by a former girlfriend accusing him of rape. What follows is a freefall into a whirlpool of court hearings, media sensationalism and jail. Samar stares at brutal police and prison systems designed to crush an individual long before the verdict.
(Spoiler ends)
BOBBY DEOL IN DARK ZONE
It's a classic dark zone crafted by Anurag Kashyap, and it puts Deol's skill set as an actor to the test. As Samar enters jail, his life spirals beyond control, down into a world he never knew existed.
Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, Bandar approaches a provocative subject with ambition. The screenplay occasionally falters while trying to escalate the slow-burn tension. Some narrative turns could feel functional rather than organic and the film occasionally strains to maintain momentum. A challenge for Deol lay in rising above such creative warts. He navigates the uneven stretches with remarkable restraint, moving away from the sort of mainstream theatrics that define his action image.
The restraint is crucial because Samar’s tragedy becomes increasingly difficult to watch. For a man whose identity is built upon public adoration, the humiliation that awaits him is not just legal. It is existential. Once he lands in jail as an undertrial, his celebrity status becomes a commodity. The police parade him as a trophy. Prison gangs use him as an asset. Survival depends upon belonging to one gang or the other and Samar is tossed around like an object changing ownership.
The popularity that once made him powerful now determines his market value inside prison walls.
NUANCED REVERSAL OF IMAGE
This is where Bobby Deol delivers the finest work of his career. The actor's triumph in Bandar is not about trademark dialogues or explosive breakdown. It is about portraying the gradual erosion of belief. Watch how resignation begins to settle on his face and arrogance dies down. Samar starts the film as someone who still clings to the illusion of superiority – a former sensation who once looked down upon television offers despite being cash-strapped. As prison life grinds him down, the illusion dies a slow death.
Deol brings alive this transformation with nuances – watch him in the moments when Samar silently absorbs insults, almost wishing he was irrelevant. As the possibility dawns on him that the brutal ecosystem he's trapped in may not be temporary after all, fear finds expression through terrified gaze or a withdrawn body language. It is a departure from Bobby Deol as we have conventionally known on screen.
ABOUT REALISING POTENTIAL
The actor has in the past spoken about how, having grown up watching the films of his father Dharmendra and brother Sunny Deol, he admired their signature, larger-than-life style and aspired to play such characters, while carving his identity. The intensity for such roles was always there, evident in hits such as Soldier and Badal. These, however, were one-dimensional roles of an era that demanded the stylish macho hero behave and look a certain way on the screen. Over time, Bobby Deol became an unrealised potential.
Bandar just changed the situation.
Anurag Kashyap's cinema has always been about damaged masculinity, moral ambiguity and emotional vulnerability. Rather than discard Bobby's glamour, Kashyap turns it into material for unconventional drama. One of the most striking aspects of Deol's performance is how often he chooses not to react.
Where Deol makes Kashyap's new film resonate is in the way he channels his familiar image as a Bollywood idol to expose Samar's grey shades and, more terrifyingly, brings alive the horrors such a celebrity may have to deal with if he faces the protagonist's crisis.
What makes Bandar particularly fascinating in the context of Deol's career is it draws upon his strengths as an actor in a way none of his past directors thought of doing.
His pick of the lot – Gupt, Soldier, Badal or Bichhoo – may have played to his strengths as a macho hero and a loverboy. There was anger, emotional turbulence, a lot of brooding and designer dazzle. These films hardly established him as the most expressive actor of his generation, never mind the trademark heavy-duty dialogues.
Bandar turns the template on its head. A Bobby Deol protagonist is not chasing justice for revenge here. He chases justice for survival. Samar Mehra submits to situations in which hardcore fans would expect Bobby Deol to turn around and fight (and win).
At 57, more than three decades after they hailed him as Bollywood's Italian Stallion following his romantic debut in Barsaat, Bobby Deol has just made his strongest case as an actor with Bandar.
Bobby Deol has just given the performance of his life in a film no one is talking about. The irony could mark the biggest recall of Anurag Kashyap's Bandar someday.
Bandar is far removed from the larger audience's idea of a movie outing, especially the fan base that sustains a mainstream career as Bobby Deol's. It explains the lukewarm response, but then Kashyap's films never promise box office fireworks. What's more, with Bandar, Deol has actually landed a screenplay where the familiar Anurag Kashyap idiom of discomfort is amped several notches. That's a grim challenge for any actor.
Deol plays Samar Mehra, a faded pop singer whose claim to fame is a single hit he belted out years ago. The crowds are long gone, the phone barely rings. The pride still survives, but only just.
For an apt casting, Kashyap perhaps didn't have to look far. Watching Bandar, it is impossible not to recall Bobby Deol's confessions in various interviews, about the years when work eluded him, and he found himself trapped in self-doubt and alcoholism. Deol, you'd think, probably lived through a version of Samar's despair.
Becoming Samar on screen, however, would be the easy part of a demanding role for Deol. The real challenge would have started when Samar's life veers away into a nightmare zone that Bobby Deol, Bollywood star, would have had no first-hand knowledge of.
(Spoiler begins)
One night, the police arrive at Samar’s doorstep: An FIR has been filed by a former girlfriend accusing him of rape. What follows is a freefall into a whirlpool of court hearings, media sensationalism and jail. Samar stares at brutal police and prison systems designed to crush an individual long before the verdict.
(Spoiler ends)
BOBBY DEOL IN DARK ZONE
It's a classic dark zone crafted by Anurag Kashyap, and it puts Deol's skill set as an actor to the test. As Samar enters jail, his life spirals beyond control, down into a world he never knew existed.
Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, Bandar approaches a provocative subject with ambition. The screenplay occasionally falters while trying to escalate the slow-burn tension. Some narrative turns could feel functional rather than organic and the film occasionally strains to maintain momentum. A challenge for Deol lay in rising above such creative warts. He navigates the uneven stretches with remarkable restraint, moving away from the sort of mainstream theatrics that define his action image.
The restraint is crucial because Samar’s tragedy becomes increasingly difficult to watch. For a man whose identity is built upon public adoration, the humiliation that awaits him is not just legal. It is existential. Once he lands in jail as an undertrial, his celebrity status becomes a commodity. The police parade him as a trophy. Prison gangs use him as an asset. Survival depends upon belonging to one gang or the other and Samar is tossed around like an object changing ownership.
The popularity that once made him powerful now determines his market value inside prison walls.
NUANCED REVERSAL OF IMAGE
This is where Bobby Deol delivers the finest work of his career. The actor's triumph in Bandar is not about trademark dialogues or explosive breakdown. It is about portraying the gradual erosion of belief. Watch how resignation begins to settle on his face and arrogance dies down. Samar starts the film as someone who still clings to the illusion of superiority – a former sensation who once looked down upon television offers despite being cash-strapped. As prison life grinds him down, the illusion dies a slow death.
Deol brings alive this transformation with nuances – watch him in the moments when Samar silently absorbs insults, almost wishing he was irrelevant. As the possibility dawns on him that the brutal ecosystem he's trapped in may not be temporary after all, fear finds expression through terrified gaze or a withdrawn body language. It is a departure from Bobby Deol as we have conventionally known on screen.
ABOUT REALISING POTENTIAL
The actor has in the past spoken about how, having grown up watching the films of his father Dharmendra and brother Sunny Deol, he admired their signature, larger-than-life style and aspired to play such characters, while carving his identity. The intensity for such roles was always there, evident in hits such as Soldier and Badal. These, however, were one-dimensional roles of an era that demanded the stylish macho hero behave and look a certain way on the screen. Over time, Bobby Deol became an unrealised potential.
Bandar just changed the situation.
Anurag Kashyap's cinema has always been about damaged masculinity, moral ambiguity and emotional vulnerability. Rather than discard Bobby's glamour, Kashyap turns it into material for unconventional drama. One of the most striking aspects of Deol's performance is how often he chooses not to react.
Where Deol makes Kashyap's new film resonate is in the way he channels his familiar image as a Bollywood idol to expose Samar's grey shades and, more terrifyingly, brings alive the horrors such a celebrity may have to deal with if he faces the protagonist's crisis.
What makes Bandar particularly fascinating in the context of Deol's career is it draws upon his strengths as an actor in a way none of his past directors thought of doing.
His pick of the lot – Gupt, Soldier, Badal or Bichhoo – may have played to his strengths as a macho hero and a loverboy. There was anger, emotional turbulence, a lot of brooding and designer dazzle. These films hardly established him as the most expressive actor of his generation, never mind the trademark heavy-duty dialogues.
Bandar turns the template on its head. A Bobby Deol protagonist is not chasing justice for revenge here. He chases justice for survival. Samar Mehra submits to situations in which hardcore fans would expect Bobby Deol to turn around and fight (and win).
At 57, more than three decades after they hailed him as Bollywood's Italian Stallion following his romantic debut in Barsaat, Bobby Deol has just made his strongest case as an actor with Bandar.
