Costao: Middling Biopic That  Scrapes Through

Rating:**

For  Nawazuddin  Siddiqui to be  fully convincing as a  Goan Catholic customs  officer, he  needed  to  first  polish up his accent. “Deshing”(for dashing)  and “impotent”(for important) just won’t do.

That said(and spoken) Siddiqui’s portrait of an  angry  government officer who won’t  be bribed  or silenced, has its  moments of strong impact, especially when Nawaz lets  the  simmering emotions of  discontent  spill  over, defining the character more by what he  feels rather than what he says.

 There is a specially forceful  monologue  by the graveside where  Siddiqui  the  actor, lets  the characters take over.

 Such  free flow of emotions is sadly rare  and  infrequent  in this turgid-to-tepid biopic which ticks  all  the  ‘trite’ boxes but forgets to loosen  up  a bit. Sejal Shah’s direction is  strictly  by the numbers.  The  screenplay is  on the  hero’s side unconditionally.Costao  was wronged.  The film is designed to  rectify the  imbalance.

 We get that.  But we never know why Costao’s rigid  duty-bound attitude  gets in the way of getting him  justice when he  is accused of murdering a smuggler.

 Oh , by the way this is Goa in  the 1990s. So we gather. Nothing in the landscape  or  the  characters’  spoken language  suggests even a hint of  periodicity.  The  film looks budget-challenged and makes no effort to  hide its  modest means and ambitions, but gets  by on the strength of  the  real -life  hero’s tenacity .

 Fatally,  Nawaz shares zero kinship with his  screen wife, played by the talented Priya  Bapat,who was  such a revelation in Applause Entertainment’s  City  Of Dreams .She is here reduced  to doing everything that wives of  idealistic  government officers  do in  our cinema. Even Costao’s terrific  bonding  with his daughter(who narrates  the story)  falls  short.

Very often  I felt  like  yanking the narrative out of its  slush of cliches, to  reveal  Costao Fernandes as  more than  a puppet hero. There is no opportunity for  the character  to  grow, not when the  dialogues constantly nudge  him to  speak like  a pamphleteer  rather than a wounded soldier  whom the bureaucracy won’t  allow to breathe.

  The mood of  suffocation that grips the narrative comes from knowing that Costao will be painted in strokes of heroism , come what way. Saddled with  dialogues  that rhyme “duty” with “beauty”, Nawazuddin struggles to make the protagonist seem  genuinely affronted  by the System. He  succeeds  marginally. The film, alas, doesn’t get anywhere  close to success.