Most of our movies are about troublesome mother-and-son relationships. Problematic fathers are seldom given a chance to have their say unless it’s a Piku which was like a clumsy version of Florian Zeller’s The Father long before The Father was made.
Looking back at Piku I see many flaws, not to mention a shamelessly manipulative ending. A death in the family is the most obvious way of generating empathy. It is also an easy way out when a filmmaker doesn’t know how to end a film. Deepika’s zero chemistry with Mr Bachchan was a palpable hurdle. The two shared no personal equation during the shooting, and it showed.
While Amitabh Bachchan’s irritable patriarchal act in Piku was borderline annoying, Paresh Rawal in a new Gujarati film is outright exasperating. Dear Father is a patriarchal nightmare. Playing a nosy meddlesome machiavellian often nasty and brutish father, Rawal delivers an unforgettable performance.
He plays a retired aimless ageing patriarch living with his son and daughter-in-law in a housing colony, gossiping salaciously about others and prying into other people’s lives. Unfortunately, this insufferable father also tends to make his own son and daughter-in-law a target of his loose tongue.
When the film opens Rawal is seen anxiously calling up all his neighbours friends and relatives to inquire about his Bahu who is late returning home from work. It soon becomes very clear that Rawal has no interest in his daughter-in-law’s wellbeing beyond the gossipy gratification of asking what she was doing out at a time when good women are home cooking for their family.
The film works better as a play, which it was originally, than as a film which suffers from extreme verbosity and minimum locational changes. Shooting inside an apartment must have been convenient. But it limits the impact of the core conflict. Maybe if this family went out a bit more, it would not fight so frequently. It is a data-driven fact that during the pandemic tempers were high in the average middle-class home where large families were cooped up for months.
The family fights with Rawal taking on his spunky daughter-in-law (Manasi Parekh), are well played…or rather they seem like they belong to a play. Providentially the verbosity does not get in the way of the dramatic core of the plot. Rawal and Parekh keep their heated exchanges interesting if not engrossing.
Halfway through the domestic dual, the narrative does an about-turn. Suddenly director Umang Vyas wants to squeeze a thriller out of the domestic drama. No harm in that. Except for the fact that the investigating officer is played by Paresh Rawal again. This double role is completely uncalled-for and as distracting as Paresh stepping into play Rishi Kapoor’s character in Sharmaji Namkeen.
To his credit, Rawal who is also the film’s producer (was he saving on costs by casting himself in two major roles?) confers a vivid life on both characters. But I would have liked to see him play just the sly meddlesome father. Rawal makes the character annoying yet relatable. Towards the end, we are supposed to feel sympathetic towards the patriarch.
What I felt was sympathy for his daughter-in-law and son who have to bear with the exacerbated tantrums and eccentricities of this character.
Dear Father has numerous faults. Its moral tone is distracting in its flexibility; we are supposed to dislike the father. But then we are supposed to like him for the same qualities which made him despicable in the first place.
The concept of a father who is more than a handful comes across in sheets of scathing dialogues where Rawal is suitably creepy and slimy questioning his daughter-in-law’s clothes, eating habits and office hours. This father ought to be gagged and placed in the oven next to the Christmas turkey.
Gujarati cinema is known be frequently unsubtle. Once in a while, though, it comes up with a film that throws forward compelling questions and even cranes its neck out of the hurling train for some answers. Dear Father is one of them.
In the Ukrainian near-masterpiece Homeward (Crimean title Evge), which acquires an augmented relevance because of what is happening in that beautiful country right now, a father Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablaev) and his son Alim (Remzi Bilyalov) carry the body of the elder son back home for a burial.
The dead son is the casualty of the Russian-Ukranian war. His death hovers over Mustafa and Alim’s togetherness as they drive through the beautiful Crimean countryside. Tempers rise. Mustafa hurls accusations at Alim who fights right back. Their shared bitterness makes sense only within the context of unmitigated grief.
Homeward is a strange and stirring mellow drama with quiet passages of rancour colliding with sudden outbursts of temper which show how volatile the situation is for the war-torn Ukrainians. Even a decent burial of a loved one is an ordeal.
Early during the film father and son stop by at the dead boy’s wife’s home. Father starts hurling accusations at his dead son’s wife while Alim supports his brother’s widow quietly but openly. As the journey progresses we realize that emotions which lie buried too deep for tears are often the ones that we need to worry about the most.
At first glance, the father and son seem to care little about one another. When Alim tries to have some innocent fun with a girl he meet during the journey, his father steps in with a despotic firmness.By the time the journey comes to an end, Mustafa and Alim are so firmly fastened together it is like an invisible umbilical cord that ties their souls together.
The climax has Alim reciting from the holy Quran as he drags his brother’s dead body to its resting place while his dying father follows. It is one of the most metaphorically plush images of love loyalty, family ties and mortality I have seen in cinema.
Mammootty in the Malayalam Puzhu is the most complex problematic father I have seen in any film since Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama. Mammootty plays Kuttan a blatant casteist, who has disowned his sister (Parvathy Thiruvothu) after she married a Dalit actor.
Mammootty’s frighteningly prejudiced patriarch doesn’t hide his biases. He is like a bull in a china shop that makes no effort to spare crunching over fragile content. Kuttan’s autocratic arrogance is amplified when he is the company of his young son Kichu (Vasudev Sajeesh).
That the 70-year Mammootty passes off as the 14-year old boy’s father is a measure of the actor’s charisma and credit. That they don’t look comfortable as father and son serve the film’s purpose just fine. Kichu is petrified of his disciplinarian dad. The boy is not allowed any space to breathe beyond school, books and parenting. He is losing out on all the pleasures that make adolescence such a rewarding adventure. The father has the boy his neck squeezing the life and breath out of him.
In the beautifully designed though at times clumsily executed film, debutant director Ratheena draws drama out of the simplest of situations, like the father making his son watch the same family video every night where he is seen disciplining the boy as a toddler.
Puzhu shows us how tyrannical parenting can destroy a child’s life. And hats off to Mammootty for slipping so effortlessly into such an evil character. Kuttan could have easily been played like a full-time villain. Mammootty embraces all of Kuttan’s negativity and alchemizes it into a force of inhumanly rigid nature. He is at once a despot and a weakling. His son hates him for his tyrannical behaviour. But Kuttan has his own logic, no matter how faulty and fractured, for what he is doing.
In his preposterous worldview and his failure to tell discipline from despotism, Mammootty makes the most despicable dad since Steve Carell in Despicable Me.
Anthony Hopkins is one exceptional actor, so persuasive in his performances that he seems to tower above everything else. Not so in The Father which to our delight, and I am sure Sir Anthony’s delight too, is a sharply drawn deeply introspective film. It comes from a very successful French stage play with just two main characters. The father, who is now entering the life-shattering zone of dementia, and his daughter who is trying hard to cope with her father’s growing sneering demands on her time and attention.
That’s it? Not quite! If only life were that simple!! Florian Zeller takes this simple premise for a domestic drama into a zone of deep psychological exploration where the father’s diminishing mental presence is manifested on screen in the form of various people who appear on screen who are not there, or at least not there at the time when we are looking at them.
There is a smiling (smirking?) man called Paul sitting in Anthony’s drawing-room claiming to be his daughter’s husband whom Anthony has no recollection of. Subsequently, many such people walk into the house. They confuse us more than Anthony. One of them, again called Paul (though with a different face) shocks us, and Anthony, by slapping him for being a nuisance in his daughter’s life.
This is a rare precious film about patriarchal missteps done up in stark striking autumnal shades. The protagonist’s mental state is never measured against cinematic conventions. The narrative just flows with Anthony Hopkins’ perception of reality leading us into a kind of psychological labyrinth that is deeply disturbing.
The narrative brings in Anthony’s gallery of illusory associates without punctuations. And yet this is a remarkably fluent and robust film, neatly and deftly edited there is no space for excessive sentimentality. Precise in its mental ambiguities, resolute and strong in the construction of Sir Anthony’s fabled reality, The Father is the kind of jigsaw where the pieces fall together only we stop trying to make sense of it.
While Olivia Coleman as the daughter looks, as usual, a little too baffled by life to make sense of it, Anthony Hopkins’s fatherly act is so authentic in its confusion that it will leave you deeply disturbed. His final breakdown in the nursing home in the arms of a kind nurse (Olivia Williams) where he compares himself to a tree with falling leaves is so poetic and Shakespearean. And yet that’s this rapidly-fading patriarch’s reality. Imagine King Lear sobbing for Cordelia who is not dead. Only gone to another country. But he might soon be gone too. And not to another country.
The authoritarian fathers that we see in our film are not always likeable. But when played by actors of Anthony Hopkins, Mammootty and Paresh Rawal’s stature they exude a lived-in scent.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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