Finding Fanny - did you find Fanny?

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Finding Fanny was a damp squib for me. By the end of the film, i wasn’t sure if we really found Fanny or if the person we found was really Fanny! 

i guess because my expectations were quite high thinking that the film will be in the league of Being Cyrus. But that is not the case. The first half goes well. In fact, the interval seemed to be too early and the film hadn’t got us to the point of “what next?” And the second half made no sense.

Good things first. The look of the film is good. The actors roped in is perhaps the main reason why so many people made it to the theaters in the first place. The best part of the film were the dialogues. The Goan style of English is well captured. And the parts written in English are also above an average Bollywood film. 

But to me, the goodness ends there. The film fails to capture any potential that the film’s lead actors or the fabulous supporting cast offers. There’s promise in the introduction of Dimple Kapadia but the film fails to take her role to the level of Being Cyrus. Naseeruddin Shah marvelously portrays the aging, lost lover. But he too, like Dimple, has no scope to spread the magic of his presence beyond a point. 

When Arjun Kapoor enters the scene, you hope that there will be revival of old romance and at least that thread of the story would take you somewhere. But except for a scene groping in the dark, there is no depth to this angle as well.

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So, at the end of the movie, i want to know if this was a love story? No. Because the lead characters don’t go through one in the film. Is this the story of unrequited love? Maybe. Because Ferdi does venture out to find his lost love of 46 years. Is this a tragedy? Maybe. Because Fanny isn’t part of Ferdi’s life despite the effort. But, like I said earlier, I am not even left with the satisfaction of having found the right Fanny in the first place! 

i guess this film is going to cash in on the initial boom of the wonderful trailers which portray it as a winner. But by next weekend the boom would have gone bust!