‘Badminton’ Short Film Review: Dibakar Banerjee Aims, But Misses the Mark

Director: Dibakar Banerjee
Writer: Anuvab Pal
Cast: Jim Sarbh, Vijay Maurya, Mohammed Ebadullah, Sayani Gupta
Streaming on: Royal Stag Barrel Select Shorts (Youtube)

Given the times we live in, it’s a source of constant intrigue that Hindi cinema’s politically aware film-makers have to be smart about expressing themselves. They have to be subtler and sneakier with their views, but also stay just as accessible.

You see a push-and-pull balance with the more prolific storytellers like Hansal Mehta, Sudhir Mishra and Anubhav Sinha. But cult-status directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee have found it visibly harder. At times, their opinions are nearly too pure. You can tell that they have so much to say—there’s a lot of emotion, passion, cynicism and awareness—but they’re running out of commercial road.

Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024) is an example from last year—the inventive feature was so sardonic, that it lost itself in its own format. With Badminton, a branded 11-minute short, he goes in the opposite direction. It’s almost too accessible.

An arrogant man (Vijay Maurya) comes looking for his partner (Sayani Gupta) at a bar. It’s a dry day, because a nameless important person died. He asks the fair-skinned bartender (Jim Sarbh) if he’s “Anglo-Indian” or Kashmiri. When the bartender brushes it off saying he’s from here, the man’s reply has the tone of someone who parodies such men: “That’s the problem with India, everyone’s from here only”. He even refers to his missing badminton-loving partner as “One of those chinky, Bangkok types”. But the second the bartender is threatened (“You outsiders come and steal our women?”), he immediately weaponises the racial bias and plays the victim card.

Every time something breaks, a Muslim cleaner (Mohammed Ebadullah) is summoned (“Sheikh!”) to mop it up.

What starts out as a typical jealous-jerk adventure quickly becomes a not-so-subtle comment on the hierarchy of discrimination and class facades. There might be a power imbalance and social structure between the man, the woman and the desperate bartender (who reveals himself to be a struggling actor, about to play the fourth lead in a patriotic Akshay Kumar entertainer). But when push comes to shove, religion wins the race.

There’s really only one minority at the place, and it’s not the priceless art instalment—a dinosaur of course—that shatters into pieces.

The pub on a dry day is essentially a narrative surrogate for India in 2025. What happens within is, of course, a tragicomic nutshell of a broader cultural identity. The problem with Badminton, though, is clear: The film is so simple that it’s over-smart. The treatment is minor-key; the satire is often lost in the loud comedy of it all. At some point, how it looks subsumes what it says. A lot of this is down to the screenplay (by writer-comedian-actor Anuvab Pal), which feels like a standup routine disguised as a film.

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The premise itself can read: A bigot walks into a bar. There’s such a burning desire to be witty, it dominates the actual messaging—the core purpose—of the short. Every loaded observation (“When you speak Hindi, it sounds like English”) unfolds like a joke waiting for an applause track. The pantomime-style volume feels odd in the hands of someone like Banerjee.

It’s the opposite end of the spectrum; usually, his world-building works overtime to sustain the depth of the commentary.

In fact, Badminton is so committed to this artifice, that it ends as a punchline to a long gag—like one of those flimsy old-school sitcoms. If it were the right mix of levity and gravity, I’d have said it puts the pun in the punchline. But I’m leaning towards “It puts the bad in badminton” instead.

The sign of a fine satire is when its ire is directed, not misdirected. On that note, you’d much rather admire the political subversion and textural audacity of the director’s zombie short in the Ghost Stories (2020) anthology. Perhaps, horror is the more appropriate framework today. After all, this is a world so inherently bizarre that no joke is too outlandish—or funny—anymore.

Reality is way stranger than pulp-fiction, science-fiction and everything in between.