Fulfils some great expectations…
Fitoor
Director: Abhishek Kapoor
Actors: Aditya Roy Kapoor, Katrina Kaif
Rating: ***1/2
Sure, at the heart of most classic romantic stories is the problem of class. Closer home, rich boy, poor girl sorta stuff (or vice versa) have been bread-butter Bollywood scripts forever.
Why are they harder and harder to write or film anymore? Well, most sensible men (I know) appear to be suffering from intimacy issues. Where’s even the question of love.
That apart, I guess in thoroughly deracinated big cities, where both men and women are financially independent, class is more and more going to matter less and less. If you do love someone, you just do. What’s the problem.
Fitoor (literally meaning obsession for something, or someone) is based on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. What’s the film’s great achievement? Its screenplay (Supratik Sen).
Because while we know the story, and it’s 150 years old, the script, set between present day upper echelons of class-conscious Lutyens’ Delhi, and Kashmir, remains plausible still.
I don’t mean “real”. That can be boring. I mean realistic enough for you not to question things too much while you’re in the middle of the experience, while the filmmakers also swiftly swivel away from grotesque melodrama that can easily destroy such a film. Since we’ve got that bit out of the way, one responds to a picture like this viscerally.
Quite simply, it works for you, or it doesn’t. There is no logic. It is about emotions. You sound like a fart verbalising or intellectualising beyond a point. I’m wholly aware of it. So, will rightly desist. Or will try to.
The prologue of this picture, where the little plebeian boy starts falling for the rich heiress (Katrina Kaif’s perfectly chosen child version), plays out against possibly the best song I’ve heard this year: ‘Aise kaise’. The title track (still playing in my head) is no less. I would’ve said very ‘Rahman’.
But by now Amit Trivedi deserves to be lauded for a stamp of his own. The background score otherwise is a fine mix of gentle notes and long passages of silence with only dialogue booming from the screen. It’s a sure sign of a very confident director (Abhishek Kapoor). Most fear silence in the hall. They believe the audiences will complain, “The film is too slow.” They probably will. Not every movie is a music video.
And if there is heaven on earth, the filmmakers have ‘recce-ed’ well to really search, locate, dust-up, and place a camera right before it. The visuals are beyond stunning. The poor little boy in the film grows up to become a sculptor/painter. This allows for an equally artistic backdrop in the indoor scenes.
A secret patron almost instantly props up the artist in the art world. He believes (as does the audience), that the moneybag behind his sudden glory and fame is his childhood sweetheart’s mother—Tabu (Now it’s become a cliché to proclaim how phenomenal Tabu is on screen. Like all clichés, it’s true). She sends her daughter off to London. Which is just as well, helps justify Katrina’s globish accent in most movies.
Aditya Roy Kapoor plays the self-absorbed, quiet, vulnerable looking lover. Something he’s played before. But he fits so naturally into such a role that one can’t blame him or the filmmakers for an obvious choice. If anything, that brooding is so infectious that I found myself wearing the same expression during the film and even after. You can sense the heartbreak, and even feel it sometimes.
Between the lead characters then, the movie firstly is a celebration of two strikingly beautiful people on the big screen as she kills him softly with her small talk and gentle glances, and he falls in love, hurting himself repeatedly beyond repair.
So: There’s a desi artiste seething in pain, a picture-perfect muse who can’t reciprocate his love, a fine soundtrack taking you along picture-postcard mountains covered in snow… You would think Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar (2011). Sure. Although that film, also based on a romantic classic (Heer Ranjha), had far more energy.
This is more of a smart adaptation of a Brit literary text. In the context of Bollywood I suppose it draws its inspiration as strongly from Vishal Bharadwaj’s Macbeth version Maqbool (2004), and his Shakespearian adaptations that followed.
I still remember coming back from a late-night show of Maqbool, diving straight to the Internet to obsess over which character was who, and how they’d ‘contemporarised’ a 17th Century play into a modern Indian setting.
Am I going to pick up Clift Notes on Great Expectations? Maybe not; reading palette isn’t the same anymore. But for whatever it’s worth, still have a frown on my face, the film’s certainly worked.
Mayank Shekhar’s new book NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING, non-fiction on desis and pop-culture, is available online and at leading bookstores