Back in 2012, Ashim Ahluwalia lit up the festival circuit with his remarkable meditation on the '80s sleaze film boom in India, Miss Lovely. That film, starring the now ubiquitous Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the gentler half of a sibling duo providing adult films to Bombay movie houses, opened to rave reviews after its premiere at Cannes. Miss Lovely's carefully crafted approach and period perfect recreations of these films and the seedy underworld in which they lived was one of my favorite films of the year, and I've been waiting ever since to see what Ahluwalia would do next.
It would appear that the wait has been worthwhile.
Last week Eros International released the first teaser for Ahluwalia's follow-up film, Daddy, and it is outstanding. Daddy is the story of real-life gangster turned politician, Arun Gawli. Gawli was a rowdy in the '70s and '80s before taking up with Hindu nationalist organization Shiv Sena after having his operations cracked down on by the police.
In the mid-90s Gawli struck out from Shiv Sena after being denounced and formed his own political party - after having several members of his former organization murdered - eventually earning a spot as a Member of the Legislative Assembly, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his well known criminal activities. In 2012, Gawli was arrested and convicted for the murder of Shiv Sena leader, Kamalakar Jamsandekar, for which he remains imprisoned.
Though this is most definitely an Ashim Ahluwalia film, the look of the trailer definitely brings to mind the wonderfully evocative cinematography of Miss Lovely, it is producer/co-writer/star Arjun Rampal who stands out from this footage. Rampal plays the titular Daddy, and his no nonsense approach to playing this unsavory character is unsettling to say the least. While Rampal, like many Indian film stars, began his career as a model, he's taken increasingly challenging roles over the years and Daddy looks like it's going to be perhaps the most interesting of all.
Don't look for your usual Bollywood fun and frivolity here, Ahluwalia pulls no punches in this first teaser, and even though there are no subs, it's pretty clear what's going on. Daddy punches, stabs, shoots, and murders its way into theaters next year.