Finding Fanny

Quite a few men may have one thing in common. Not having the courage, at the right time, to ask out, a particular woman who would have been the dawn in their lives. Life goes by. The pain lingers on though and eventually turns into regret, nostalgia and other such emotions.

But what if one had the courage to ask the woman one loved but having received a no in response believed that he had been rejected. The sting of rejection and the loss of love would be suffocating. He would not want to wake up in the morning fearing that he would have to face the day filled with the same searing pain and incapacity. The man with a strong will to live and do will recover early by sheer striving followed by the man with a tendency to philosophize who would find justification in the fact that the person was not meant for him. Others may also recover because the challenges of daily living, mundane or extraordinary, will drown the agony in due course.

However, what if, years later, in the dusk of his life...  he gets to know that the message never reached the woman? That his destiny was crushed not by the woman but by the quirks of fate? He is gripped by a pain he has never experienced before. His days have become nightmare. He cannot sleep at night waking up with parched lips and dry throat every hour. Walking on the edge of that precipice which can wrench the entrails of younger men must be overwhelming for a man in ripe old age.

That’s the start of Finding Fanny. Daunting. Nasiruddin Shah, finds, after 46 years, that a letter by him proposing to his lady love never reached her.  Egged on by a young widow Deepika, the old man sets out to find the woman he had lost. His journey becomes the journey of the viewers also.

We live, with the characters, their quirks and the quirks of life where the love, hate and lust of the characters have the expanse of the roaring sea and transience of its waves. Their love and despair at its loss seemed so deep once. In the next moment it might turn out to be stupid. It may be discovered suddenly that the lady he pinned for is a soulless vessel.

In their road journey in a rickety car, we discover the beauty of Goa captured in great details by consummate cinematography. The skilful cameraman has Goa, Deepika and bountiful Dimple to shoot. The visual impact of the movie soothes the senses. The oddities of the characters and the humour of their conversation put the viewers at complete ease. You attain a mental state to have a perspective on love, hate, lust, life and death. I got one. Please go and get one for yourself. I cannot disclose what happens to his lost love, because there lies the charm and depth of the movie which you must discover and savour yourself.

PS: The movie has its flaws though – some parts such as Deepika’s relationship with Arjun Kapoor are contrived. It is a must watch, overall.