By the end of the ensnaring Season 2 of Rana Naidu, on Netflix, only one of the protagonists passed away. And he was, by all moral standards, the most decent member of the cast, who deserved better.
The razor-sharp writing (Karan Anshuman, Karmanya Ahuja, Ananya Modi, Ryan Soares, B V S Ravi) elevates what could have been just one more jaded crime thriller, into something special, almost extraordinary, thanks to the actors who get the point: that the good don’t always win, and that, as ABBA famously sang, the winner takes it all.
It is hard to tell the winners from the losers in Rana Naidu. They sometimes feel as though they are cut from the same fabric. But there is a difference. And to know the difference, we have to follow the nocturnal adventures of the Naidu family(and that includes the ladies) right to the end.
Venkatesh Daggubati’s Naga Naidu is a marvel of characterization and portrayal. How the actor makes the character funny, sinister, sensitive, ruthless, self-serving, and yet willing to do anything to protect his family is a trade secret only Venkatesh knows. Suffice it to say he is the Show’s backbone, a blotchy patriarch redeemed by his self-abnegating humour.
My favourite moment in this season—and there are many of those—is when Naga Naidu’s young, innocent son Tej (Abhishek Banerji, delivering a masterclass in image-reversal) asks how to be the “best dad” in the world.
“Just don’t do all the things that I did,” counsels Naga.
It is a heartbreaking moment. And to really weigh in on the enormity of that statement, one has to understand Naga Naidu’s complex moral codes and his messy but unwavering relationship with his family.
The violence, though widespread and endemic, is not gratuitous. Every conflagration has a complex history, and to penetrate the Show’s violent core, we must first explore the Naidus’ family dynamics: this is the only show that gets its mojo from Francis Coppola’s The Godfather without copying even one frame from the mafia classic.
The plot unravels in determined, free-flowing motions, never letting externalities, such as conversations and action, get in the way of the core conflict. The actors, particularly Venkatesh Daggubati, Sushant Singh, Abhishek Banerji, and Arjun Rampal, propel the plot towards the brink of brilliancy.
The women characters don’t get that much space to articulate their grievances. But Kriti Kharbanda as a dangerously self-serving go-getter who outwits the purveyors of patriarchy with a dose of their own poison, leaves an impact. Shouldn’t she be seen more often?
Rana Naidu’s second season leaves us craving for more. It portrays a highly inflammable world of crime and violence, festooned by a sense of family kinship that makes sense only to the insiders. To get there, we need to follow the Naidus’ gaze into the abyss that they all fear and hide their terror under a seething anger and contempt for their enemies.
Although it has three directors (Karan Anshuman, Suparn S Varma, and Abhay Chopra), there is a compelling homogeneity to the storytelling that carries us along right to the end…well, almost. The concluding one-to-one between Rana Daggubati and Arjun Rampal looked like a closure that the distributors urged, when there were none.
