Colourful saga of violence, corruption and decay Daddy
Director: Ashim Ahluwalia Starring: Arjun Rampal, Aishwarya Rajessh, Nishikant Kamat Ask any actor of some worth. nesque laziness. This is a It is not easy to play a known power- packed implosive living character. Audiences performance. Rampal plays and the character that you Gawli as a time bomb waitare playing, plus their close ing to explode. Compariassociates, judge the persons are not called-for. But formance with scrutinized I can’t help compare Ramharshness and normally find pal’s Gawli with Shah Rukh it wanting. Khan’s Raees. The two sagas
Not this time. Not Arun of Robin Hoods with furious Gawli. Not Arjun Rampal, FIRs on their wanted heads, who has shaped into one bear many similarities. of Hindi cinema’s most deArjun goes right in. He is pendable actors who does the only recognisable face his roles with such smooth (provided his physical and efficiency and such noiseless emotional transformation excellence that we are liable leaves any room for recognito miss the point. tion) in the vast cast of what
Don’t make the mistake of I suspect to be several realconfusing Arjun’s laidback life anti-socials. Cannily, the wisdom in portraying the director builds the quirks gangster-philanthropistaround killings and feuds of parliamentarian-convict criminal clans through acArun Gawli as a Devga- tors 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.
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. IANS