Director:
Ankush Bhatt
Producer:
Karan Arora
Starring:
Kay Kay Menon, Piyush Mishra, Deepti Naval, Prashant Narayanan, Shilpa Shukla, Pawan Malhotra, Vedita Pratap Singh.
The film has all the right ingredients of a gangster movie that audiences are familiar with (courtesy Ram Gopal Varma Sun-tanned, unshaven goons, corrupt cops, fanatic mob bosses dressed in the colours of their respective religions, testosterone-induced roadside violence and an ample amount of Hindi gallis. The setting is Mumbai's gritty, grimy, underbelly, complete with beedi-smoking gangsters, dance bars and prostituting eunuchs. Kudos to the director for getting this right at least.
When it comes to the plot, though, Bhindi Bazaar meanders aimlessly in so many directions, and is fraught with so many undeveloped subplots, that at the end of it, one feels like offering the filmmaker a free-of-cost crash course in the craft of making crime thrillers.
The film kicks off with a simple premise that leads to another relatively simple premise that leads to another premise that you don't much care for, which leads to something you wish would just stop. To take things further down complexity road, the events in the narrative are reflected in a game of chess between newcomer Gautam Sharma and Kay Kay Menon .
In another example of deficient storytelling, the only hint we ever get of the identity of Kay Kay's character is a dialogue that goes something like: "Usse dono area ka mamu bana do".
This line will make more sense after watching the film, but who the hell Kay Kay is playing anyway will continue to be a puzzle. Utilising a single complete game of chess as a metaphor for a story told in flashback is, admittedly, a beautiful concept, but it would have been a lot more beautiful with some competent editing.
The acting, however, isn't bad for the most part. Piyush Mishra and Pawan Malhotra, both veteran actors, pull off their roles of opposing mafia bosses with ease.
Prashant Narayanan is brilliant as Fateh, but will have to try his hand at a variety of other roles if the industry is to gauge his abilities.
Gautam Sharma, Shweta Verma and Vedita Pratap have nothing special to offer as actors while veteran Deepti Naval, and Shilpa Shukla of Chak De! fame are deprived of, at the script-level itself, any scope to utilise their talent. The most unexpected (and annoying) of performances is probably that of one-time superstar Jackie Shroff playing a narcotics officer in yet another subplot which gets killed even before it can take off. Shroff stumbles into the frame, shabbily dressed and mouthing incoherent lines, and slows things down for both the film and the audience.
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