Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai – My Flash Review!

One can easily mistake this film for a typical masala action flick starring Salman Khan or Ajay Devgn. In reality, it is a courtroom drama made almost in documentary style with Manoj Bajpayee in the lead. The Bajpayee factor upped my interest to watch the film that dropped on OTT last week.

The strange title for such a film notwithstanding, Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai or in short Bandaa is a film that pieces together the real-life events around the arrest of Asaram Bapu, who had thousands of followers at one point in time and his fall from grace after being convicted of rape charges. The film almost re-tells the actual courtroom drama that followed Asaram’s arrest, the failed attempts to get him bail and finally his conviction under several sections.

Now, the real-life material itself is quite meaty and interesting with the various twists and turns that happened during the court proceedings that went from sessions court to high court to the Supreme Court but faced setbacks. The film is written by Deepak Kingrani who has written the story from the point of view of a small-time sessions court lawyer P.C.Solanki. So, what we see is the film beginning with the normal routine life of this lawyer who leads a simple and righteous life. Along the way, the police direct the victim’s family to approach this lawyer who takes up the case even after knowing the very high risks involved.

The Director and the writer choose to tell the story in a very linear and flat way by sticking just to the legal aspects of the case from beginning to end. They avoid the usual temptations of adding drama to the proceedings by getting into the backstory of the lawyer who is shown to be living with his kid and mother without the wife in the scene. Similarly, the screenplay also doesn’t dwell too much into the emotional trauma the victim and her family would have gone through. In my opinion, this is both the plus and minus of the film. Plus – as the screenplay remains taut by just focusing on the courtroom manoeuvres of the parties involved and Minus – as the proceedings fail to invoke any emotional connect with us as viewers. Yet, what works is showcasing how our legal system can be painstakingly procedural that it may end up denying justice.

Director Apoorv Singh Karki for whom Bandaa is the first film ( I guess) gives a good account of his filmmaking skills and the way he goes about painstakingly re-creating the real-life events like the arrest scene of Asaram in the beginning. The courtroom scenes are shown as real as possible without the glamour usually associated with them in films of yore. Camera Work by Arjun Kekreti is also equally commendable.

The film is elevated by its cast led by Manoj Bajpayee. He acts well most of the time and over–acts at times but fits well in the character of a small-town sessions court lawyer. Some of the other actors playing real-life characters like Subramanyam Swamy and Salman Khurshid who appear as Asaram’s counsel are all well cast.

I wonder what made the makers go with a tacky title like this but I urge everyone not to judge the film by it. Bandaa is a well-made film based on events of the not-so-distant past that we would have forgotten in these times of low attention and retention spans. I would put it in the ‘Must Watch” category. Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai is streaming on Zee5.