Chaman Bahaar: A Small Towner’s Guide To Eve-Teasing

Chaman Bahaar(Netflix)

Starring: Jitendra Kumar, Yogendra Tikku,  Ritika Badiani

Directed by : Apurva Dhar Badgaiyyan

Rating; * ½

Jitendra Kumar is  fast becoming the on-screen face  of backwater backwardness. Barely had we  gotten over his last  OTT outing Panchayat where he played a petty government official in the wilderness, when now he shows  up in another  windswept counter-progressive town in Chattisgarh where  he plays a  paanwala ogling  endlessly at  a  girl who moves into the  house  across the street.

Same to shame.

Don’t get him wrong. Billu  is not a lecher . He is  just one of the many worthless Romeos  in the sleepy  town-like village  who  have  found a new way to  entertain themselves  by  ogling at the  new  unattainable girl-woman(Ritika Badiani)   who walks her dog on the godforsaken  highway as  though she were  Urmila Matondkar in a  whole  town of Ram  Gopal Varmas.

Chaman Bahaar is  meant  to be an  excruciatingly  funny take on mofussil mores and  the  lack  of sexual experience in  places where there is no  socializing  over the gender barrier. In truth the sexual  innocence that the  director attempts to find in  his callow  unsophisticated  hero is just a myth manufactured in the  filmmaker’s head.

In reality   it  is    very very dangerous to show an underage girl being gawked and stalked by drooling  boorish  bucolic  loverboys who  probably  go home and watch porn.

Chaman Bahaar is  a terribly misfired  comedy. Lacking in a sense of moral  rectitude  it resorts  to repetitive  jokes and  gags  shared by  boys in  the changing room after  a game of kabbaddi. The  best  thing to happen to our  pathetic  hero  Billu is  the cop who  thrashes the living  daylights  of  of his  manhood reverie  and demolishes  his paan ki dukaan.

I almost cheered and got up to go home. Except that I  was at home and there  was  nowhere  to go. Chamal Bahaar  feels like  a trap .