**
With multitudinous activities spawning across a person’s timeline it has become essential to invest time wisely on the entertainment menu that one is served with these days. So when the teasers leave one with doubt you reach out for your trusted reviewer friends to help you out. Most trusted Khalid does not write these days so then one reaches out to Rajeev Masand and Anupama Chopra. They are generally dependable and when they are not I have worked out a way to read between their words. They have the unwise charted territory of also having the film folks on their show before the releases and that in itself creates a conflict of interests. Their reviews in this case left me uneasy as they reluctantly praised and heaped stars on the movie.
Homi had indeed excelled in his first ‘Being Cyrus’ a pretty dark movie with sophisticated treatment. Strangely the look of the film reminded me of Matru Kee Bijli ka Mandola . Wondered if Pankaj Kapur was solely responsible for me feeling that.
Ten minutes into the movie saw me exchanging my leg, the first sign of trouble in a movie for me. Fidgeting is the first big sign of reaction to inactivity in the script or the inability of the director to hold your attention with the visuals. I remember I kept doing the twists and ended in knots in Saawariya. But that is another story.
Nasiruddin Shah managed his expression as expertly as he always does while the camera caressed a lazy script of an old postman who receives an old mail of his undelivered and supposedly the triggering point for the script to take off. We still think it is the setting of the plot stage which is key and the stretch of this timeline varies from director to director. A delicate looking Deepika appears on the scene as a young widow living with her mother in law Dimple Kapadia and who fawns over over Nasiruddin Shah her like a daughter would. There is plenty in Goa to fill in a thousand cameras and yet the camera here is stumped for action beyond realistic looking interiors of houses. It dismisses the stunning Goanese landscape with unusual carelessness. It is about Deepika’s character nudging and then helping Nasiruddin Shah’s character to help find his old love Fanny and in the road journey being accompanied by a car owner Pankaj Kapur, her stout mother in law Dimple and her old boyfriend Arjun Kapoor.
Road trips lead to amusing and sometimes meaningful evolution of characters that go on a journey together. But the chirpy plots in this script are extremely contrived. Vulgar one liners and antics are passed off as intelligent mature and witty banter. Did not amuse me one bit though there were kind giggles in the audience trying to perk themselves up in the boredom which envelops. By the time the intermission hits you, you are desperately looking at your watches.
Found the plot and treatment hollow and very pretentious and extremely unentertaining. It was practically boring and that made me a feel a twinge of sadness as I would really have loved to see Homi do a fantastic job with this setting with opportunities galore for an entertaining script. If only they did not think that only being slow and deliberate could help them differentiate themselves from the poor quality movies released week after week.
And surprisingly in a movie bordering on boring, it must be noted that you cannot find fault with the performances. However Nasiruddin and Pankaj Kapoor have done far superior roles than these before. Arjun looks and sounds like he walked off the sets of 2 States and Dimple does ham a bit. It is stunning Deepika who helps the bored audience stay put. The dubbing in Hindi apparently over the English is extremely distracting when one starts paying more attention to the lip sync rather than what is being said. There are glaring mistakes like Nasiruddin leaving to find fuel waving a large white plastic can and then returning with a blue one. Post sex talk between characters are supposed to somehow exhibit the liberal acceptance of the new generation towards out of marriage physical contact but ends up sounding like an artificial posturing. It is also irksome to note excess focus on oversized hips of people or lusty artistes oogling over aged opposites.
Finding Fanny is not Funny beyond a few giggles.
