INSPIRED!. Review on Banjo

Most Bollywood heroes prefer Switzerland or New Zealand or similar scenic locations for dream sequences, but Nand Kishor alias Tarrat Bhai(Riteish Deshmukh) isn’t one of them. He likes to sweep the Mumbai streets with his beloved even in a beautifully planned and executed dream song. After all, this is what he has seen.

Chris(Nargis Fakhri) leads a privileged New York life. She has the luxury of opting music as a career, unlike Tarrat and the members of his Banjo team, who play on the streets of Mumbai for survival.

A Banjo band is little known even in the music circuit. Banjo has never been seen as an instrument that can replace guitar as the lead string. Truth be told, it was always a middle-class instrument, in this case, a lower-class. But, defiance, rebel and grit form the strings of banjo, and that’s where it scores over heavy-sounding percussions.

Riteish Deshmukh and Nargis Fakhri come together for National Award Winner Ravi Jadhav’s Hindi film debut .(YouTube)

Some laugh, some just nonchalantly watch when Tarrat comes out of the gutter in the introductory scene. He might be a motor-mouth, but helplessness is written all over his face. He can’t hide the fact that he extorts money for the local corporator, or he is a drunkard, or he has been a loser throughout his life.

But, he plays banjo at local Ganpati festivals and that’s a sight to behold. There, he is the master and the universe takes cues from his notes. One such performance has reached Chris and now she is in India to make music with his team. Other team members are Grease(Dharmesh Yelande), Paper(Aditya Kumar) and Vaajya(Raja Menon).

It’s about crowded streets, roaming dogs, filthy bylanes, hopelessness and rearing spirits. Director Ravi Jadhav’s world is a glossy version of usual Mumbai ‘chawl’ life. Tarrat and his gang dress like others of their age group, and you may not find any difference when they are in a mall, but they return to their houses in the evening to find that nothing has changed. It’s still the same dull, hard life.

Banjo is a film by someone who can see Mumbai with indigenous eyes. Scratch the filters and it’s as raw as it always was. Nargis plays Chris in the 137-minute film.(YouTube)

So, it doesn’t come as a surprise when two rival banjo gangs physically fight over the money they receive after playing at a Ganpati pandal. Money is what keeps them ticking. Otherwise they drink, even during their performances.

Though Riteish has a suave look, he has tried his best to shed it. He might be playing a typical Bollywood hero, but vulnerability crawls into his actions. In fact, this side of his personality overpowers the ‘hero’ one. The songs and the mood set up by Jadhav do the rest.