Small Town Cacophony :
The set-up is unusual—a Malayali Christian family in Ratlam. A railway junction where, a character says, trains only stop at night. It is otherwise a nondescript town, ugly and crowded.
When the show Bandwaale (on Amazon Prime Video) opens, David (Ashish Vidyarthi), the principal of the local college is incandescent with rage, because an anonymous poem about a kiss has been confiscated, and this sort of thing cannot happen on his watch. The poet happens to be his own daughter Mariam (Shalini Pandey), prone to penning childish rhymes in a diary. Her younger sister, Cynthia (Sanjana Dipu) thinks Mariam has great talent, and sets up a channel called Myna, for her to recite her verse, with her face hidden (Secret Superstar idea), because the father is conservative and and ill-tempered. The mother Valsala (Anupama Kumar) is terrorized into submission. David is the kind of man who forces a fellow (Devendra Ahirwar), who fancied daughter into unpaid slavery as her “rakhi brother.”
The sisters are stupid enough to believe that the poems could make her an influencer and earn enough money to get Cynthia to MIT (in the US). Written by Swanand Kirkire and Ankur Tewari, directed by Akshat Verma (with one episode out of eight helmed by Tewari), the show teeters between comedy, farce, melodrama and inexplicable twists that lead nowhere.
Myna hardly gets any followers, so Mariam decides her poems ought to be set to music and approaches the town’s star singer, Robo Kumar (Kirkire), who accompanies the New Modern Brass Band, as they play at weddings. Unbeknownst to her the long-haired, middle-aged, portly man has fallen in love with her after seeing her dance at her friend’s wedding. In typical small town fashion, his entourage of musicians start calling her “bhabhi” and keeping an eye on her. The collaboration with Robo does not work, so Mariam thinks she might make an offer to the mysterious DJ Psycho (Zahan Kapoor) in the barsaati next door, whose techno beats appeal to her.
Rafi (Vikaram Kochchar), son of the band’s owner, Ismail (Robin Das), wants to update the band too and hires Psycho. Robo and his gang of clowns are immediately alert to the possibility of the young man romancing Mariam. However, David, after seeing the same wedding dance, decides that it is time Miriam was married. He summons his brother Sebi (Naushad Mohammed Kunju) from Kerala with a list of suitable boys. Jealous of his brother’s wealth, David demands that Mariam marry the man Sebi has chosen for his daughter, and swats away all protests. It is as if Roysten (Addis Akkara), clueless to all the drama swirling around him, were the last man on earth.
In between David’s machinations and Mariam’s hopes for a career as an influencer, the series derails into absurd subplots, which have no bearing on anything else going on in the family. If there’s a melodramatic misunderstanding over a pregnancy in one episode, it is the crazy rescue of another character from a charlatan’s clinic.
Encouraged by the enthusiastic Cynthia, Mariam registers from an influencers’ competition, but everyone has to jump through hoops to prevent David from finding out. Robo and Psy attach themselves to Myna as her “band.”
If there’s anything remotely interesting about Bandwaale, it is a look at how young people of hinterland places like Ratlam and Jabalpur keep up with the opportunities offered by new technology. The germ of the idea is lost in the ridiculous shenanigans of Robo and his cohorts. Kirkire may be a decent comic actor, but romantic hero (even a delusional one) material he is not. Shalini Panday, with her resemblance to Alia Bhatt, is pretty enough, but in this show wears one sullen expression. Zahan Kapoor has the kind of role he will be embarrassed about later. The Malayalam-speaking actors in supporting roles lend the show a degree of authenticity, which the helter-skelter script fails to achieve.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)