Dancer Amy Yakima and choreographer Travis Wall danced breathtakingly to a song called Wicked Game (performed by James Vincent McMorrow and written by Chris Isaak) in one unforgettable season of So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) and the highlight of the performance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ0QrJaPFcQ) was a gravity defying leap where Amy just flew into Travis’ arms while the audience gasped. So even before watching Fitoor, when I saw The Leap being replicated in a song called Pashmina by Katrina Kaif and Aditya Roy Kapur, I was a bit taken aback. Later there were reports about how Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud had inspired the mood, the setting etc etc of Pashmina. Abhishek Kapoor’s adaption of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has also taken a few narrative cues from Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 cinematic adaptation starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. So what is it that Kapoor brings to the film that is not derivative? That took me some time to figure as the love birds seated next to me kept asking each other till the last scene between giggles and popcorn crunch, “Mufti? Woh kiska baap hai? Firdaus kaun hai..Katrina? Masroof… matlab? Urdu hai?” I almost felt bad for Kapoor for trying to employ poetry and silence in the narrative and failing to connect with the noisy bunch of Valentines who knew nothing about either Khusrau or Charles Dickens.
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The bits I loved came in the beginning. When Noor is still not a muscled monolith and is just a young boy (an angelic Mohammed Abrar), with a face swept clean of anything but pure wonder. His childhood is a series of picture postcards celebrating the almost unbearable beauty of a valley that he describes in retrospect as ‘‘jannat..jo kafan odhe soyee thi.” A valley that even in bleak devastation recalls Hazrat Amir Khusrau’s exclamation, “Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast” (If there is a paradise on earth, It is this, it is this, it is this). So ofcourse, the Estella in this story has to be called Firdaus who like the valley she is born in is tinted with a Chinar red glow (that came supposedly at the price of Rs 55 lakh but we are digressing).
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Noor’s childhood is full of real pathos, a sense of lack and longing and silence as he navigates the snow sprinkled pathways, riding pillion on a scooter with his endearing brother-in-law, and crosses over from his warm cosy home to the cold-hearted haveli where he will lose his innocence. Noor’s interaction with the young Firdaus, his grief when he loses a loved one, glimpses of gun toting soldiers on a bridge as his little boat floats by… all translate into bitter art installations when Noor finds his way mysteriously into Delhi’s art circles. It is here that the film loses its emotional heft. Despite the beautifully written and tuned songs and Tabu who is one of the few actors today who can speak Urdu the way it is meant to be spoken and a face that with time has grown even more beautiful. Despite her one big breakdown scene that tries to tie the loose ends in the narrative, this is a story that somehow fails to stir you.
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Tabu? Well, in the days when she played devastated leading ladies, her awards notwithstanding, she was a physically awkward actor, someone who cried the same way in all her films, did not really know where to put her arms and what to do with her walk, her gestures. Post Maqbool, Cheeni Kam, Haidar and now in Fitoor, her physicality has disappeared and what you see is the purest essence of an actor who melts into a moment. She cannot resist the occasional grandstanding as when she recites Khusrau to a terrified Noor but why should she? She can pull it off and is increasingly standing in her full power as a performer and despite a sketchy Miss Havisham that she is expected to fill up, she does as well as she can, chewing her lines, crying her beautiful eyes out, taunting, controlling, wasting away.
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Kaif on the other hand is all body. Rippling thighs, shoulders and neck carved out of marble, playing the woman who is here now and gone in the next instant. It is when she appears on the scene that the film becomes even more problematic. Her lines are not intelligent. There is no subtext here except the hair colour and the fact that she is beautiful. When she says, “Don’t be silly..you hardly know me,” she nails the emptiness of her character. Unlike the book, the film does not show us clearly and cogently that her character has been groomed to perfect rejection and play mind games and toss away passion callously. Kaif’s Firdaus seems to have no inner life at all as she flits in and out of beautiful galleries in lovely clothes, occasionally making eye contact with Noor, clinking wine glasses and walking away from him again and again. We don’t see the insidiousness of the agony that she and Begum Hazrat are supposed to unleash in Noor’s life as one wallows in the death of hope and the other thwarts love. Even Noor’s rejection of his mysterious benefactor and his final confrontation with Begum Hazrat do not make us leap to his defence or sympathise with him.
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He just comes across as an ungrateful brat who cannot take rejection and keeps wrecking the great opportunities that life keeps strewing his path with. When he is asked, “Which part of this don’t you understand?,” we want an answer too as he gets drunk at an auction and screams a jingoistic slogan at Firdaus’ Pakistani suitor. Aditi Roy Hydari too has travelled far from her Delhi 6 days. The devastation we are supposed to feel when her heart is broken is more cosmetic than wrenching. Rahul Bhatt on the other hand is a palpable punchline and brings some amount of vigour to a story that by now has lost its way in beautiful sets and inane conversations.
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Aditya Roy Kapur is earnest but when you remember his Noor, it is his torso that flashes before your eyes rather than his soul. Just like the film that is all lace and baubles and panna necklaces and silver brooches, silk scarves, candle lit dinner tables, swooping curtains but with no semblance of a beating heart or as Tabu says, “Andar sab khaali ho gaya hoga.” The resolution when it comes too does not follow a cogent chain of events. So yes, Firdaus gets that love can be lost but never forgotten when she inherits a family heirloom representing an unlived life but like the snow that falls all around her last sprint to freedom, even this seems orchestrated rather than natural. Anay Goswamy’s cinematography and the music by Amit Trivedi work. This is not a bad film but it falls short of the red hot passion that Katrina’s hair, pools of wet paint and heaps of Chinar leaves are supposed to evoke in us. Watch it for the young Noor and glimpses of a beautiful valley that we rarely see on Hindi film screens today.
Reema Moudgil is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ with Timbre Media and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.