Movie Review : Finding Fanny |Watch English version to Enjoy More

Cast: Nasseruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Kapoor

Director: Homi Adajania

Plot: The story revolves around five characters and is set in a village called Pocolim in Goa where life is slow and simple. Their needs are minimal and they live a retired life. A young widow Angie (Deepika Padukone) decides to help the old postman of the village Fredie (Naseeruddin Shah) to find his long lost love.

Movie review:

‘Finding Fanny‘ is fashioned like a serio-comic journey, featuring a wooly romantic, a lusty painter, a middle-aged matron, a lithe maiden, and a sulky young fellow. It is an unlikely bunch, getting together for an unlikely reason, and in the way of this kind of film, we are supposed to fall in love with the characters and their quirks, as they wind their way towards their destination and discovery.

There is Angie (Deepika Padukone), a young widow who lives with her rather crabby mother-in-law Rosie (Dimple Kapadia) and a cat named Nareus. Angie is friends with Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah), a lonely old man who pines for the love of his life – a woman who he thinks turned him down. Thanks to the chance discovery of a decades-old letter, he finds that this isn’t the case. Angie insists that they must find Fanny and achieve closure. No one, she tells Ferdie, deserves an incomplete love story.

Angie enlists the help of Savio (Arjun Kapoor), her one-time friend, who fell in love with her but left the village after she married another man. Back in Pocolim after six years, Savio spends his time rifling through his ancestral home and looking longingly at Angie’s long legs as she passes him by. Angie decides she needs Savio’s old car for the road trip, but since the car has been sold to local artist Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapoor), they both also come along for the ride.

Now, as any Goan would tell you, nowhere in Goa takes more than three or four hours to get to. Which means there’s no reason for the trip to take an entire day and night. Also, no one speaks such perfect English in Goan villages, and the Konkani the characters speak is nowhere close to the actual language. But given that the film itself isn’t too concerned with mundane details like authenticity, and is set in a dream-like world, these mistakes can be overlooked.

Even if you accept the film’s almost fairy-tale setting, it is still difficult to reconcile with the flimsy premise and its hurried conclusion. There are plenty of clever lines, some lovely cinematography (Anil Mehta) and Kapadia’s spirited performance as Rosie that redeems “Finding Fanny”, but it also leaves you wanting more.

Angie and Savio’s romance is dealt with in a superficial way, while Ferdie’s character and his search for Fanny begins well but gets lost somewhere in the second half. Ferdie is missing for much of the later part, sauntering in and out like a forgotten character.

But the performances are superb and everyone plays their parts well. If you had to pick one though, it would have to be Kapadia’s. As Rosie – sometimes irritable, sometimes sad, but always feisty – she’s the character that stays with you long after the film ends.

“Finding Fanny”, for all its flaws, is a rarity in Bollywood. A not-too-long English film with characters you would not find easily. If only Adajania had the courage to go all the way and tell the full story of these five characters, it would have been a great film.