Feb 16, 2016 08:43 PM
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Fitoor begins well. In snow-covered Srinagar, young Noor offers a fugitive militant food and warm clothing. Noor accompanies his brother to the mansion of Hazrat Begum(Tabu), where he meets and loses his heart to her haughty daughter Firdaus. As the children spend time with each other, they stack up a life’s worth of memories. Noor plots his way out of his impoverished world to become an artist of reckoning. The 131-minute movie begins its slow slide when Noor grows up.
A mysterious inheritance from an unnamed benefactor takes the adult Noor(Aditya Roy Kapur) out of Srinagar into the chic art world in Delhi. Noor finally has a gallery interested in his scrawls and installations, and when he meets Firdaus(Katrina Kaif) again, he thinks that he might finally be her equal. Firdaus’s red mane matches her mother’s, but she is as cold as the Kashmir snow, having decided to follow the path chosen for her by Hazrat and marry an influential Pakistani politician(Rahul Bhat). This is the closest that Fitoor gets to being an allegory for the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination, which, as per the period in which the narrative is set, should have been blazing outside the gates of Hazrat Begum’s lair. The decision to locate the film in Kashmir, rather than any other snowy locale, must surely have been deliberate.
Fitoor makes faint references to the pro-independence movement, and when Noor is asked for his views on the subject, he replies as a child would: I want everything to go back to what it once was.Noor is talking about Firdaus, but Kashmir’s real lost world is far too complex and tragic to be reduced to a romance.
