Jun 17, 2006 05:34 AM
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(Updated Jun 18, 2006 02:18 PM)
In Hollywood, there is a distinct line between a commercial success and a critical success. The first rakes in the dollars, the other collects the Oscars. Of course, once in a while we get a few films - like Lord Of The Rings and Titanic – that plant one leg on either side of that hallowed line, but a majority of the movies can easily be grouped as one or the other. On one side we see classics like Ben-Hur, The English Patient, American Beauty and The Pianist which were all given the highest honours at the Oscars, and on the other side we see movies like Just Friends, American Pie, Notting Hill, You’ve Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle etc.
If we were to spend a little time trying to formulate a general theory about what kind of genres never make it as a critical success, romance comes rushing to the mind straight away. Full-blown romance has never been a darling of the industry; only once has a romance movie won an Oscar for best picture in the history of Hollywood, and that was Casablanca. Perhaps this ought to tell us something about how easy it is to make romance films; perhaps the people who nominate movies for the Oscars are trying to make it clear that romance is not to be taken seriously, and they should know, for the Oscars' voters list comprises the best technicians from all disciplines in the industry.
Let’s face it, making a girl blush and having a guy rattle off poem after poem with a flirty little smile on his face is not the hardest thing to do. Yet, that’s exactly what happens in Fanaa, at least in the first half. Zooni Ali Baig, a blind girl from Kashmir comes to Delhi to perform a dance on Republic Day and falls for Rehan, the local guide who seems to have a shayari for every occasion. Zooni herself is no slouch; it turns out that she has anticipated this situation and has been practicing her own verses all her life; and after a few exchanges and a song (Chand Sifarish), Zooni is convinced that Rehan is her Knight in Shining Armour.
A bomb blast at India Gate brings some sanity to proceedings and when Rehan’s clothes are found amidst the debris, Zooni’s life as she knew it comes crashing down on her, despite the fact that she gets her eye-sight back at about the same time. The focus then shifts to an airport in Bangkok where a lean man smartly dressed in black overalls is shown in every possible angle before the camera zooms in on his face. Well, well. Rehan, it seems, is very much alive, and what’s more, he was the one who masterminded the bomb-blast. Shock. Horror. Yup, he is a terrorist.
As soon as the second half starts, Rehan wastes no time in accidentally finding Zooni’s house on one of his missions, badly wounded and in dire need of medical attention. A few fun-filled scenes and a song later, Rehan has to make a choice on whether to stay with Zooni or complete his mission. Zooni’s dad has to make a choice between telling on his son-in-law and betraying his country. Zooni has to make a choice between letting Rehan go and, well, not letting him go. Where all these choices lead these characters makes up the rest of the story.
Unless you are a hopeless romantic, so hopeless that you have lost all sense of reality, all through the movie you can’t help but wonder at the stupidity of Zooni Ali Baig, and at the tenacity of the director/story-writer of portraying a woman, any woman, in that light. We often talk about how heroines are just props in our movies and how degrading that is, but if the alternative we have is of seeing a dumb, guy-crazy girl playing a ‘challenging’ role, I would be hard pressed on which one to pick. Zooni’s character, I am sorry to say, is an attack on womankind’s intelligence, and for me that is as chauvinistic as it gets.
Consider. You are a blind girl on a five-day trip. You meet a guide who starts flirting with you from the very first moment he sees you, throws a few limericks in your face, sings a song and takes you around Delhi. By the end of the first day, you have fallen in love with him, and by the end of the fifth, knowing that you are going to leave him forever the next day, you sleep with him. Now surely, you will be sane enough to use protection? Nope. The clincher, though, comes at the end, the very end of the film when Zooni says ‘Zooni bhi Rehan se bahut pyaar karthi hai’, the day after she finds out that Rehan is a terrorist and that he has killed both her dad and her uncle. If this is what a character-oriented role is, please, please have them running around trees singing senseless songs. That’s much, much better.
Rehan’s character is probably the sketchiest in this whole rigmarole. Aamir Khan seems to be confused as to whether he is supposed to play a cold-blooded killer or a darling husband. But apart from a few wrinkles appearing here and there, there is not much to fault in his performance. Kajol was good too, both as the blind lovelorn girl and the mother. Rishi Kapoor is strictly adequate. Tabu comes across as the most believable of all as a detective. Cameos by Kirron Kher, Lara Dutta, Jaspal Bhatti and Satish Shah don’t even warrant a mention. The sets and colours were beautiful and so were the locations in most of the scenes. Music, again, is strictly okay with none of the songs likely to linger in public memory for a long time.
Don’t let the terrorism backdrop distract you for even a moment from the fact that Fanaa is a romance, albeit not a full-blown one. Romance has a lot of sub-genres, like romantic suspense, erotic romance, futuristic romance, western romance and the like. Since Fanaa does not readily fall into any of the existing ones, perhaps we ought to make a new sub-genre that fits it perfectly. How is romantic terror? Or maybe terrifying romance?
