In a scene from Netflix’s Bhakshak, a determined young woman tells her senior colleague the difference between a human being and an animal. “Insaan apne dimaag ka istemaal karke apni zubaan chala skta hai,” she says. It’s a quiet declaration of intent, birthed in the punchbowl of dignity. In places where humanity is imprisoned by power, the quality to merely peel away pain from the eyes of the mute or the oppressed, becomes an act of humanisation. To simply bear witness, the film proclaims, is to dehumanise both the subject and yourself. This is familiar territory for a narrative to appeal from. Bhakshak belongs to a long line of Hindi films set amidst rowdy, small-town sensibilities which reduce morality to a municipal battle between good and evil. Reality is significantly more complex, a jigsaw of opportunism, trauma, greed and socio-political decadence. That missing nuance notwithstanding, this is still a gritty, if familiar, parable of finding redemption at the end of a really long and dark tunnel.
Bhumi Pednekar plays Vaishali Singh, a budding TV journalist who runs a robust, indie news channel trying to punch above its weight. Singh is assisted by cameraman Bhaskar, played assuredly by Sanjay Mishra. Bhaskar and Singh represent this unlikely, cross-generational team of scribes who seem to rely on the other’s ability to see beyond their line of sight. It’s an interesting, but also criminally underexplored dynamic. Singh and Bhaskar run a wistfully relentless operation, one whose skin can’t quite cover the skeleton of its ambition. A dodgy tip about an orphanage enabling the abuse of young women, run by a powerful peer in Bansi Sahu (an exceptional Aditya Srivastava) becomes their calling.
Bhakshak is set in modern-day Bihar, in a milieu that is adequately brought to life. The language, the crude sexual politics and the demeaning male gaze of the landscape prevail as a form of insight into a place where maybe no woman has ever enjoyed a sense of autonomy.
Singh, herself is bogged down by the expectations of a married life and the conforming compartments it must eventually settle into – housewife, motherhood, etc. Unfortunately, it’s an aspect of her character that seems woefully underserved.
Singh is undeterred by the piling expenses of a business that doesn’t quite repay her. And yet her ambitiousness feels abstract, never quite grounded in the literature of meaning and reason. Journalism is propounded as this woke instrument of dissent, of which Vaishali Singh for all her determination feels like uninteresting patron.
Directed by debutant Pulkit and backed by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, Bhakshak has the tone and tenacity of a chokehold. To its credit, it doesn’t look away from a viscerally brutal world. Some of the sequences trigger without necessarily undressing, so to speak. The culture of savagery so easily mimed by men who look and sound like your next-door neighbours is provocative and moving. A scene where an undertaker asks about the caste and identity of a woman about to be cravenly disposed, is written with this unshakeable ink of realism. For this steadiness of a glum worldview at least, the film is chilling, disturbing and deserving of a better set of characters.
Bhakshak is also so preoccupied with texturizing its world with darkness, that it forgets to find some, if pitifully few, moments of nuance or even variation. Srivastava, so exuberant and arresting, is surrounded by accomplices and co-conspirators – including a woman – who aren’t quite allowed the livery of an inner life.
It’s understandable to mark evil as opaque and distant, but the same unfortunately, also applies to the protagonists and their methods of pursuit. Singh and Bhaskar, at least on paper, make for a fascinating duo but feel underdeveloped as people, hoisted by a film’s expectations of them compared to their own personal arguments with life. Pednekar’s feuds and disagreements with her family, in fact, come across as tertiary impediments as opposed to crippling reality checks. Her eventual victory, so to speak, is never in doubt.
Bhakshak deals in the kind of visual and aural language that would be a hard sell for theatrical releases these days. It’s unflinching, vicious and might even make you squirm with unease. For all the triggering snapshots of violence and abuse, though, it can’t offer a singular character that stains our whitened self-conscience. The fact that it eventually eclipses not as a story, but as this speech urging everyone to feel for the feeble, translates to an indictment of storytelling itself. The story, the narrative, the cinematic rigour, should have been enough. Better films about justice in the face of unprecedented, brute odds have been made before, but for the evocation of a specific kind of barbarity, Bhakshak is maybe as relevant as it is daunting to watch.
Bhakshak is now streaming on Netflix.
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