In the 1995 Ketan Mehta film Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India, a very young Shahrukh Khan played a character called Hero, a symbol of ambition that floats into Mumbai, on a straw of hope. The film was also about a foolhardy plan to replace the President of India with a clone. Most importantly, the film captured the mad, infectious energy that would one day turn a wannabe Hero into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Director Maneesh Sharma is obviously a true fan because his film draws from this as well as a lot of Shahrukh Khan’s early films. And in creating a homage to Khan, he has not given us the mannerism ridden superstar we have become over familiar with. He has instead reminded us of the boy we first fell in love with not because he had a ripped torso or chiseled perfection but because he had hunger, palpable passion, raw emotion that made us feel for him things we had not felt in a long time.
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The Shahrukh who stopped the traffic with a cry of , “Oh Tabahi..aah tabahi, ” in the title track of Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India. The Shahrukh who bangs his head against a wall in Deewana and screams, “Mohabbat ho gayi hai mujhe? Mohabbat ho gayi mujhe!” The Shahrukh who runs like a little demon on the streets of Mumbai while Sunny Deol chases him in Darr. And the climax where it seems he had really broken his shoulder though the only thing we saw and heard was that lacerating scream he lets out. A scream that was part longing, part pain and part rage and is still painted in gaudy colours at the back of autos. And Baazigar where we feared him and loathed him but could not stop watching him.
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This was the Shahrukh that was with time refined and erased out of existence in blockbuster after blockbuster. In Fan, we revisit that Shahrukh Khan again. Though Maneesh knows that he can’t turn back the clock and Shahrukh can never be a young, famished nobody craving for success. He is no longer the impetuous sode ki botal (as the brilliant Varun Grover calls him in the title song) so he does the next best thing. He creates a ‘fan’ who has his drive, bits of his face but none of his imperious power. And this fan is everyone that Shahrukh has played in the early days of his stardom. And because nothing can now possibly be unattainable for Khan, he himself becomes the object of obsession.
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The fan’s psyche is like the twilight zone that Darr’s Rahul had turned his room into. This fan, like Rahul, is a stalker who leaves messages on mirrors, makes threatening telephone calls and can never be caught. He is the Ajay of Baazigar who has lost his humanity because everything he loves has been taken away from him and there is also that notorious terrace scene where we watched Ajay in horror as he pushed Shilpa Shetty off the ledge like a lifeless pawn. Only here..the pawn and the player are the same but we are giving away too much.
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Without the baubles of stardom, he gets to be the actor he once was. Gaurav Chanana is possibly his best creation so far because while the performance uses the actor’s stardom as a backdrop, we also see the dehumanisation that fans put themselves through when they idolise someone too much. The humiliation they are willing to suffer and the absolute incomprehension of their own sense of self, their own value as valid human-beings.
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When Gaurav is being beaten in a revoltingly dirty prison cell and curls up on the floor like a child who has been robbed of his innocence, vomits and cries and then grows silent and hardens, we forget it is Shahrukh we are watching. This is a feat the actor has not achieved in a long long time. The hunched body, the wide, adoring eyes, the affected swagger and ofcourse the primal howls of loss and pain craft a creature that outshines almost everything Shahrukh has played in the recent years.
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The film also touches upon the complex relationship fixated fans have with their idols and how they are consumed by their love for them, and the desire to be like them and to claim them as their own till something snaps and then they want the same idols to fall off their pedestals and be destroyed. And the politics of fame that enables a billionaire to buy a superstar’s time and make him dance at a wedding but keeps genuine fans at an arm’s distance as they gather around his bungalow in an amorphous mass and can never been seen or heard as individuals. There is a poignant moment in the end, when Khan scans the crowd outside his house for the first time to make eye contact with a fan who had come once before but was unable to meet him.
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Gaurav’s parents played by Deepika Amin and Yogendra Tiku, his middle class milieu and life are heart-warming and far removed from the world that Shahrukh’s screen avatars have been inhabiting but it is when the realism gives away to a never ending chase up and down tiled roof tops in exotic foreign locations that the film loses its grip. From someone who was unable to get past the gate of his idol’s home, Gaurav morphs into a shape shifter who can pass off as the star himself at Madam Tussauds, gate crash a billionaire’s daughter’s wedding and ad-lib great lines and even enter the superstar’s home and vandalise his study without being caught. His face which only vaguely looks like the man he is pretending to be also does not make people suspect him. The second half does not pretend to have a story and is just a prolonged cat and mouse game that ends in a middle class colony in Delhi. The kind that Khan himself rose from.
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What drives the film in the end is the performance of Khan and the thought that perhaps fame and anonymity must respect each other and learn to co-exist without erasing boundaries of basic human courtesy. A sense of irony however lingers long after the film is over. That arguably the biggest Muslim superstar of his generation, even while replaying parts of his own story on screen must pass off as an Aryan Khanna rather than Shahrukh Khan.
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 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.
Reema Ji, the views expressed within your article are shared entirely by me. I thought this not only, as I started to read it, but after having watched the movie a few days back too.
At times the movie confused me – is it not just a take on Khan trying to say something through this film about his journey in film to date? I don’t know. But, for me this is a long way from Baazigar. The one film for me, which still defines Shah Rukh Khan.
This movie is dark. It has dark undertones, wrapped quietly in Gaurav’s blanket of self illusion, obsession and naiveity. All of which are highlighted even more, when Gaurav is imprisoned and brutually beaten. And maintained up until the point he states that if Aryan Khanna finds out the officers will be sorry. As a viewer it breaks your heart, right up until the moment his ‘idol’ himself dispels the elusion.
Here hits the real world. It’s not the filmi duniya anymore.
The truth in this moment, is captured skillfully in the expression that follows on Gauravs face. The disbelief. The – YOU? It was you! You knew?
I agree entirely that sympathies lye entirely with Gaurav, but I think too that he is not your typical fan. Just an extreme example of one. He is not even a complete ‘common man’ character, so to speak. Gaurav, is witty. Quick. Full of life. Energetic. Positive enough to be an idol himself, for the effort he puts into idolising someone else. But he does not see his own qualities. Like perhaps so many ‘fans’.
It reminds me of The Talented Mr Ripley, ‘I would rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody’. This film makes you think, who is real and who is not. Everyone on screen is a nobody. Even when they are big names. They are all playing someone else. They are acting. I wonder why Shah Rukh Khan did not just keep his real name in this movie.
Despite big production names, big industry names- truth is that if people do not turn out – neither does the money. That, ironically serves to be the dividing line between ‘stars’ and ‘fans’ in the end.
For what stars can buy and how far they try to remove themselves from where they started. I loved the way this is shown, when Gaurav wants to travel and stay in the same train compartment and the same hotel room as Aryan. The line begins to blur. Between who he actually is and who he thinks he is. The fact that he is unaware of it all, is played out well too. But his almost childish innocence gets turned into something dirty. He is not a fan!
The film presumes to tell us, that this is not the definition of a fan. But throws the question out there – guess what it should be? But at the same time it is accepted that actors can be a little arrogant, show attitude and mix only with their equals after making a brief necessary courteous appearance to the people who got them there.
When Gaurav repeats back Aryan Khannas lines to him, about his fans being behind the making of him, in answer to why he should even give 5 seconds of his time, the point is succinct and clear. Trying to say, that no ones life is really any less or more important. It is always made out to be. Is that not what social media is showing us? Everyday people. Doing everyday things. Who just happen to be famous.
It is so confusing too. They are everyday people, who want to keep their distance. I don’t get it. May be the ‘fans’ mentality is wrong. Maybe the ‘fan’ should just respect the human decency. But does it not come down to the simple fact, that what anyone ever wants is respect?
Every effort is made to play with emotions and to sensationalize reality by the film industry, so that it is more easily swallowed and hooked on to . Isn’t that all a ‘fan’ is a result of? And because stardom is within such easy reach now, why not try for it. Either your own. Or someone else’s.
This same stardom when multiplied tenfold, opens itself up to so many perspectives, especially I think, when it runs alongside the 24/7 social media mess. Of everyone being contactable, any time any day, by anyone, any time any day.
There is no privacy anymore. No mystery. No space. No distance. What someone has done, when, is out there. You can check someones status and know what they were doing a few minutes ago. An hour ago, a couple of seconds even. Get updates on them. ‘Follow’ them.
The same does not translate into real life. Away from social media, people hardly notice one another. Rarely speak. Or make eye contact. Why? But would wait outside in any weather for a star that would not notice any one person amongst a crowd crushing you, even if they liked your post a few weeks earlier. Who are you really to them? Who are we really to anyone in even everyday life, until we do something that makes us be noticed? That just seems to be the way of society.
Your article made me think all this Reema ji. I love the way you wrote this article, in fact, all of your articles which I read without fail. For not only the way you wrote it, but what you wrote and the message you absolutely convey.
Your article left me thinking only this -that I am still hoping that I am part of the few that, do not want to lose their identity in someone else. That, I am someone who can make her own identity even if it is not one that comes to be known by masses. I don’t crave such attention anyhow.
I believe that I am SOMEONE still. Been raised that way!
Watching fan made me think, to check myself that I do not become so unawares of my own life and self that I get so lost in a ‘celebrity’ or ‘star’ for the fact that it fills some emptiness.
I have always believed that what people achieve they achieve for themselves for whatever reasons. I believe too, that just because you are a fan of someone you should not think that you are less capable than them. Or hate them. Or be jealous? What is the benefit in this?
I have never thought like this. And do not wish to. If anything, I welcome the wealth of inspiration that opens up and this is the only way I wish to see it.