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Friday, December 13, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD DADDY
EDITOR'S PICK
'Daddy': Arjun Rampal gives Arun Gawli new life (Review By Subhash K. Jha ; Rating; ****)
Ask any actor of some worth. It is not easy to play a known living character.
Audiences and the character that you are playing, plus their close associates,
judge the performance with scrutinized harshness and normally find it wanting.
Not this time. Not Arun Gawli. Not Arjun Rampal, who has shaped into one of
Hindi cinema's most dependable actors who does his roles with such smooth
efficiency and such noiseless excellence that we are liable to miss the point.
Don't make the mistake of confusing Arjun's laidback wisdom in portraying the
gangster-philanthropist-parliamentarian-convict Arun Gawli as a Devganesque
laziness. This is a power-packed implosive performance. Rampal plays Gawli as a
time bomb waiting to explode. There are no extra toppings, fringe benefits,
perks or bonuses to this performance.
Rampal plays it straight. Director Ashim Ahluwalia gives the actor no room to
stretch out his character's inner world. Fleeting looks and fugitive gestures
add up to making Rampal's Gawli one of the most comprehensive projections of
guilty gangsterism in recent times.
Comparisons are not called-for. But I can't help compare Rampal's Gawli with
Shah Rukh Khan's "Raees". The two sagas of Robin Hoods with furious FIRs on
their wanted heads, bear many similarities. Except that Shah Ruh could never
enter his gangster character's world.
Arjun goes right in. He is the only recognizable face (provided his physical and
emotional transformation leaves any room for recognition) in the vast cast of
what I suspect to be several real-life anti-socials. Cannily, the director
builds the quirks around killings and feuds of criminal clans through actors who
surrender to their characters with a brutal velocity.
Watch out for Rajesh Shringapure as Gawli's accomplice Rama and Farhan Akhtar
playing Dawood as so cool, you may confuse the jungle for the greenery. There is
a brilliant conniving female character Rani (played with smouldering slyness by
Shruti Bapna) who uses sex as an ATM machine. Rani tells part of Gawli's
stories. Other people associated with his life tell the rest.
The editors piece together the saga with layered urgency. This is not an easy
story to tell or for us to comprehend. There is no room here for any actor,
least of all Rampal, to strut with guns and appear even remotely macho. If you
are looking for a stylish take on gangsterism, look elsewhere.
Besides its technical excellence, the biggest achievement of "Daddy" is its
portrayal of violence as swift, repugnant and utterly ugly. The shootouts and
here I would like to commend action director Shyam Kaushal, are brutal, terse
and to the point. The killers do their business with swift professionalism
leaving no room for self-congratulatory paeans to violence that Tarantino,
Coppola and nearer home, Mukul Anand and Mani Ratnam have specialized in.
In one notably savage attack, a petty gangster infiltrates a jail cell and
pounds an inmate to a pulp after shooting him. What we see is the gut-churning
fury of violence in all the graphic sequences of gangrenous gang wars where we
hear every bone crunch with the wince-inducing impact of a blow delivered in our
popcorn-munching faces.
For me, the real hero of "Daddy", besides Rampal (and some, not all, of his
co-actors) is the sound editor Sangik Basu followed by the cinematographer
Jessica Lee Agne aided by Pankaj Kumar who bring to the frames a sinking feeling
of an unwashed blood-soaked doom.
The narrative spares no smiles and laughter in portraying Gawli as a reluctant
gangster forced to pull the trigger against his better judgment. There are
smirks galore, though. I've yet to see a film that has more characters
displaying sneering contempt for their adversaries. If there are five characters
on screen, each one is doing something that will drive the plot forward.
In one brilliantly conceived shootout, the policeman Vijaykar (Nishikant Kamat,
unrecognizable) ceaselessly on Gawli's trail, interrogates Gawli's mother
(veteran Usha Naik).
"Does he owe you money? Why are you after his life?" she mumbles.
Strain hard to listen. The sounds of death, violence, corruption and decay are
omniscient in this saga of a man who would rather be a messiah. The problem here
is there are so many characters colonizing Gawli's perverse kingdom played by
actors who don't act, and the unsparing editing (Deepa Bhatia, Navnita Sen
Dutta) that won't let the audience breathe in the toxic fumes of fury for long.
Consequently, many of the dark disturbing characters are lost to us.
So here's what we do: watch the film very very closely. It is a difficult but
finally hugely rewarding experience. The performances are so minutely
non-bravura that the characters are so into their world of self-destruction that
we are left looking in without ever being allowed to be part of the design of
doom.
See the film, maybe twice over to get the nuances. See it for the austere
unflinching portrayal of violence. For sounds and visuals that do not afford us
the luxury of aesthetic gratification. And most of all, for Arjun Rampal's
powerful performance that creeps up on us without warning.
I would call it a tour de force but for the abject absence of flamboyance in the
presentation.
Actress-filmmaker Pooja Bhatt yearns to go back to the time when safety was a norm and people were "truly kind" to each other."Take me back... to times when life was more gracious, safety was a norm and people had the time to pause and be truly kind," Pooja tweeted on Sunday.Read More
Film business chews you up, spits you on sidewalk: Mahesh Bhatt
Veteran filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who has had a four
decade-long association with the Hindi film industry, says a person needs to
have guts for resurrection and reinvention to survive in show business.
"Film business just chews you up and spits you out on the sidewalk. To survive
in show business, you need guts and the ability to constantly resurrect and
reinvent yourself," Bhatt tweeted on Tuesday.
Known for movies like
"Saaransh", "Daddy", "Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin" and "Aashiqui", Bhatt co-owns his
home banner Vishesh Films.
Read More
