In Apoorv Singh Karki’s directorial, Bajpayee tries but can’t rescue a film that feels cursed by its own self-seriousness
“Badi jaldi aagye, wahan se direct flight hai kya? (You came quite early. Is there a direct flight from there?” a Delhi-based policeman says, condescendingly to his Bihari subject in a scene from Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhaiyya Ji. It’s a scene that indicates outright, the political margins within which this film is supposedly set. Margins that are reluctantly looked at as distant, meek and ungainly. So much of this country’s socio-political narrative is shaped by the Delhi-Mumbai duopoly, that the emergence of a force from beyond the centres of cultural production, feels as unlikely as it is also regularly undermined.
Bhojpuri cinema, music and culture have carried the burden of ridicule and it makes sense to counter that narrative through one of India’s finest actors to have come out of that space. For all that combative intent and historic realignment, though, Bhaiyya Ji piggybacks the worn and tiresome ‘pan-India’ manual to the point that it feels rooted in anything but conviction.
A scuffle over parathas, outside the New Delhi railway station results in the cold-blooded murder of a young boy. Bajpayee plays his decisively possessive older brother Ram Charan, also known as ‘Bhaiyya Ji’. Charan’s personality is a tense mix of familial duty and suspended menace. He arrives in Delhi, much like most Bihari migrants, hands folded, awaiting all that grandeur to translate to natural justice. The city, it seems, is just as rotten as the hinterland is often made out to be. The indignity of it all returns Charan to a violent chapter of his life that he has, out of respect for his late father, buried. Push ultimately comes to shove as Charan reclaims the legend, exacting vengeance as startlingly slow, at times, ungracious, speed.
Cumbersome visual design
Directed by Apoorv Singh Karki, this is Bajpayee’s 100th film and it has that commemorative gaze, an almost laidback attitude towards narrative development. Characters aren’t given shades as much as they are given the tools of hindsight. The only events happening feel reactive, with very little emerging from the geometry of human emotion. There are obviously scenes where Bajpayee breaks down trying to exhibit grief and loss, or sequences where he tries to communicate with an oddly stiff mother but little about this film feels couched in a sense that all anger is also a synonym for vulnerability. Instead, it is supplanted, like a whim or a tattoo, that Bajpayee spends the rest of the film trying to both scratch and deepen.
You can tell a film is confused about its purpose when it withdraws from its charismatic performer, the very thing that makes him stand apart from the rest: crunchy dialogue delivery. He is instead forced to pose, dig in his heels, inflate his chest and do your usual action hero shtick. You want to believe he is having fun, but it looks strangely effortful.
There is promise in the idea of a star who found his second coming on OTT taking on the mantle of the bratty single-screen hero. But without the actor’s usual toolbox, it feels more like a feeble attempt at recreation than creation. A free-hit for his 100th film feels fitting, but although it allowed room for experimentation, the film doesn’t actually try to reinvent. Instead, Bajpayee feels like an ageing icon, farcically constrained by the cumbersome visual design of a film that could have maybe tried to use, if not all, a proportion of his key strengths.
A tiresome broth of manhood
Bhaiyya Ji and Bajpayee, at large, can obviously be credited for trying to flip the tables of perception. The actor famously lent his voice to a Bhojpuri song, right after the catastrophe of the migrant disaster became apparent in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. This is him, trying to leverage his stardom to position a culture, well beyond the belts of entitlement and urban scrutiny. But any attempt to rectify or rescue cultural perception must be based on the creation of an alternative. Here, some truly gifted actors are reduced to noisy bores who can’t help but echo the shrillness of what now feels like a slow-motion epidemic of creative incredulity.
There is an argument here that the constitution of the modern action film flirts with noisy senselessness so often that the difference between entertainment and voluntary suffering is probably negligible. Bajpayee, as is now routine, tries. His faculties present an opportunity for those trying to work around him, but it also comes with certain inevitabilities. Swim the crest of a wave long enough and mediocrity will eventually find a way of clinging onto you.
Bhaiyya Ji is what you get when a magisterial actor is bogged down by the dissonance of ideas around him. So much so that even an uppity free-hit feels like an exercise in boredom. It’s neither thrilling as a cultural argument nor enthralling as a by-the-bones action film. A native reference here, a linguistic twist there and all you are left with is a tiresome broth of manhood that, surprisingly, doesn’t even offer the one thing you expect a film high on testosterone to deliver — ballsy masala.
