Banjo review: There’s a lot to like in this Riteish Deshmukh film

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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.

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).

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