Master Bantoo

A modest trumpet player in a wedding band, Bantoo finds a new calling when he meets an inspiring street musician. Bantoo’s artistic rebirth, however, threatens to cut him off from reality. A warm, dreamlike psychodrama that charts the awakening of the creative spirit.

The brass section of the Kirti Wedding Band in suburban Delhi, India, has a clear mandate: keep the energy up, stick to the repertoire, play second fiddle to the drummers and above all, look good. Not the place for experiment or invention, the band requires its performers to keep their heads down and play by the book. But when trumpeter Bantoo, once a reliable team player, is bitten by the art bug, he begins to march to a different beat.

In his warm, woozy debut feature Master Bantoo, Arsh Jain surveys the underexplored margins of the baroque Indian wedding culture. Shot intimately in extreme closeups, Jain’s film traces the aesthetic awakening of its wide-eyed protagonist, whose dream of social mobility and creative autonomy runs up against his precarious material circumstances. 

“You need to be a little cuckoo to reach the peak,” remarks Bantoo in one of his imagined celebrity interviews. With nervous energy and a vivid, impressionistic style, Master Bantoo fuses realism and reverie, crafting a hypnotic work in passionate defence of artistic solipsism.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Trailer

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