Manoj Bajpayee plays the lead role of Bhonsle in the film. Director Devashish Makhija has mixed technical proficiency and poetic beats. Bajpayee brings out restraint and gravity that is tied in the kite of the director’s imagination and the moment it is pulled away we get a harmonizing film experience.
Bhonsle is a constable in Mumbai police. The film starts with his retirement, an unassuming and quiet affair fitted against the preparation of Ganpati idol for Ganesh Chaturthi. The sequence sets the tone for the rest of the movie. He goes back to his little chawl room and leads an alone and aloof existence.
The chawl has people of different tastes and Vilas a taxi driver, wants to exploit it for his political career. He tries to bring out the anger in Marathis against those he considers to be others that is the Bihari migrants. Bhonsle does not pay attention to him or anyone else and continues with his monotonous routine. He observes and speaks when required.
A young Bohari woman moves in with her young brother and Vilas increases his wicked acts. This is the time when Bhonsle’s quietness faces a test. Makhija’s cinematic ambitions are hampered by a grounded and bottoms-up approach to filmmaking which is an exciting part of the movie. The film plays out wholly in the background of Ganpati festival.
If you have previously witnessed the director’s work the dance sequences picked up from various festivals should not surprise you. However, in Bhonsle, it is built within an intricate cinematic architecture where their appearances move the narration forward and give a breathing room from the sober tone in the movie.
A little chawl that is hidden away in the megapolis, Makhija has an ambitious project where he shows a constable as a protagonist and taxi driver as villain. The life of Vilas is however unexplored but Bhonsle’s life is explored fully. His endless dreaming in the concrete megastructures and his refusal to be insulted by his station is shown brilliantly by the director.
Bhonsle continues with his meaningless existence all the time and the director amply shows us the life he leads in a dirty room. The director brings out poetry in the boring scenes and makes it a powerful and overly mounted dream sequence. We participate in the ritualistic style of living as well as to Bhonsle and pick up clues of his existence from a screechy voice coming out of radio, a half-eaten bread in the plate or a crow at his window.
We walk into another man’s house and start dissolving in his walls and we keep on watching him until we fear becoming like him. The sequences show the most brilliant filmmaking in the director’s career. The film is devoid of excesses which lead to Ajji’s failure, Makhija’s last produced movie. The unbroken and long shots are Makhija’s trademark and are justified and rewarding in a large framework of the film.
A slow zoom out takes us away from Bhonsle’s face to the crowd and dissolves him with an immensity. We see a bridge being formed between one section to another. The relationship of the director with aural and visual metaphor is at times regarding or fraught and gives varying results in the movie. He places heavy metaphors and balances it by a visual foreground of Bhonsle’s life which is enriched further by Bajpayee’s wonderful performance.
The mumbled dialogues remove the weight of visual metaphor. When his patience finally breaks, we get to see his ferocity of wrath which binds us to the character. Some parts of the movie are blended together to form a wholesome cinematic experience that delivers excellence. Makhija is completely aware of the inner dilemma in the movie.
He crafts realism and also resorts to editing and fracturing time. He chooses a simple plot and carries it to a natural ending that fulfills Bhonsle’s character and enriches and justifies the film. Ultimately, it is Makhija’s quality of bringing poetry in the monotonous life of a person which is the trademark of the movie. The film is gloriously committed to truth.
The truth is of people who travel thousands of miles from one building to another, truth of fast-approaching death, of anger, indignance in the face of injustice, of manhood deprived of resignation, agency, of things taking time before working in your favor, the burden of broken dreams and silence which surrounds the noisy city.
