Dear Dad: Swamy a delight, film not so much

Cast: Arvind Swamy, Himanshu Sharma, Ekavalli Khanna

Rated: 5/10

More than anything else, even more than the serious subject this film deals with, it is an Arvind Swamy film. Remember that chocolate boy with arresting and strangely calming screen presence in Roja andBombay? He has grown up in this last decade of absence from the screen  grown up to be a more mature, more arrived actor, happy in his rarified cinematic space and ready to experiment with cinema at his own pace, on his own terms.

That’s why, probably, he has opted for a film like Dear Dad  a gentle take on evolving familial relationships riding an uncomfortable closet skeleton.

Swamy, a much more rounded actor in many ways, is a delight in the film which is otherwise in a bit of a hurry to hurtle to a happy conclusion of a complex relationship issue. The subject, a gay dad and his son, is both sensitive and bold. It signifies the new wave cinema that Bollywood is now accepting and also powering and not flicking aside to struggle in the genre of parallel, film festival circuit cinema.

Having said that, the way the story unfolds is a let down as it gets into those nooks of cluelessness from where emerging is a struggle. As a dad who finally lets out the secret to his teenage son that he is gay and would be seeking a divorce, Swamy sports many well-rested nuances which the film grows on. However, the now angry and quickly happy teenage son makes it a story that loses way and does pretty much anything to come to an end. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 15 May, 2016