Sangeetha Devi Dundoo

A scene in director Abhilash Reddy Kankara’s Telugu film Maa Nanna Superhero (my dad is a superhero) shows the protagonist Johnny (Sudheer Babu) taking his house owner to task and abruptly pausing when the latter’s daughter comes into the picture. He does not want to make the man seem a lesser mortal to his child. The narrative attempts to ride on the universal emotion of children seeing their father as a superhero. Abhilash wonders how far a son would go to save his father, with whom he shares a tumultuous relationship. The plot becomes more complex as it involves a father Srinivas (Sayaji Shinde) and his adopted son Johnny, and later, the biological father also returns. This idea might seem intriguing at the script level, but the film seems uneven and is held together by a few endearing moments.

Nine years after SS Rajamouli’s Baahubali – The Beginning left viewers curious about why Kattappa killed Baahubali, a spate of films have been mounted ambitiously, with scope for sequels. This has turned out to be a double-edged sword. While filmmakers get the scope to present in-depth character delineations and build the world in which the story unfolds, there has also been a tendency to overstretch the narrative. A few questions are left unanswered, with the hope that the audience will wait in anticipation of a sequel.

When a man who wears his masculinity on his sleeve laments at how his son is growing up, displaying feminine traits, his wife tries to make him understand the importance of accepting an individual’s natural expression of gender. This segment and the portion that follows gives writer-director Hasith Goli’s Telugu film Swag the much-needed emotional anchor. Until then, the narrative is like a satire, with elements of farce and ‘absurd theatre’ as the several characters played by Sree Vishnu and the dual characters of Ritu Varma slug it out to assert the power of male versus female.