Fanney Khan Review: Everybody's Famous?

Really, considering the success of the unpredictable Secret Superstar, Fanney Khan has no business being as whole-heartedly awful as it is. What Zaira Wasim did so effortlessly in that film, Piyu Sand should be able to in this one. How Raj Arjun blended anger with fear, Karan Singh Chhabra should be able to differentiate between anger and creepiness. I could go on and on. But Fanney Khan is mind-blowingly bad, mainly because of the messaging it sends across.

Another Aamir Khan production you can draw comparisons to is Dangal (2016), a smart wrestling film that championed women empowerment and openly discussed the harmful side-effects of parents pressurising their children to follow their own incomplete dreams. If anything, Fanney Khan, completely pioneers the acts. It shows Fanney/Prashant (a spunky Anil Kapoor) as a victim; not a perpetrator of his own actions.

And director Atul Manrejkar runs with this narrative - making Fanney’s daughter, Lata (Sand), his wife, played by Divya Dutta and his co-worker, Adhir, ‘all responsible’ for trying to reason with this overbearing, pressurising father. Which is why it’s so problematic that Fanney Khan toots its own horn so much. Its characters-err, caricatures are made to be so bitchy and rude, that they’d give Mean Girls (2003)’s Regina George a complex.

While it hides these problematic themes and tries to adorn them under the garb of body empowerment, they glare out, with this messaging of celebrating a rather problematic practice - especially in a country like ours - surpassing the body empowerment one. And that’s a shame. Because, Fanney Khan can be enjoyable in spurts. The scenes that especially stick out are those involving Rajkummar Rao’s mild-mannered, stammering Adhir and Aishwarya Rai’s red-haired Baby.

They have a quiet chemistry between them, that the director skilfully only allows to simmer ever so quietly - so that it’s lingering in each scene but never overshadowing the bigger picture. This would have worked, were the ‘bigger picture’ of this film not so absurd. It follows Fanney Khan, a factory worker, who is so hung up on his dreams, that he places them on the shoulders of his overbearing Lata (get it, Lata?), an overweight girl with oversized dreams. She, unlike her innocent father, understands what it takes to succeed in this ‘business’.

I almost expected reels of Raai Laxmi from Julie 2 (2017) to re-emerge and give Lata the details about the casting couch. But I digress. Fanney, in the spur of the moment, kidnaps this film’s Sunidhi Chauhan, if you will, a red-haired Aishwarya Rai, playing ‘Baby Singh’. He uses the help of his unwitting friend, Adhir, played by a confused Rajkummar Rao, who looks like he lost interest within the first day of shooting the film, to extract ransom from Baby’s manager, so that he may fund Lata’s album.

The optimistic and effervescent Anil Kapoor is quietly chaotic as the titular character. The manipulation of the writers - where Fanney’s daughter, is as big a bitch to him as one can be, for no apparent reason - works perfectly, especially when Kapoor, who looks younger than Rajkummar Rao in this one, flexes his acting chops. Aishwarya Rai, with the limited screen time she gets, also works hard to imbue Baby with a little more than the Kangana Ranaut Fashion (2008) track, but fails, mainly because of the comical writing.

Rao is a mixed bag. His acting talent is wasted and he’s toned down, resulting in a gargantuan loss of talent this film could have benefitted from. Piyu Sand and Divya Dutta, also play second fiddle to Kapoor, doing nothing to propel the narrative. It all results in one hell of a climax, that makes Dhadak’s weird climax seem like Nagraj Manjule himself shot it. In short, it redefines the word absurd. It involves a posse of policemen/women (this film can champion gender equality too, when it’s not propelling the baap-beti angle.) who start clapping for a kidnapper, whose characteristics make him seem like the villain from any Hitchcock film broke the fourth wall, escaped and shot a Bollywood film.

Fanney Khan is based on an Oscar-nominated Belgian film, Everybody’s Famous. The logic is simple - if Everybody’s Famous could do it, why can’t a scene by scene remake of it do it as well? Because, Fanney Khan isn’t just an exercise in absurdity, it’s a terrible film. But, to its credit, it does give meaning to its original’s title. In Manjrekar’s warped land, everybody can be famous - you only need a crazed father, a bitchy daughter and some handy kidnapping tools. Easy. I’m going with 1.5 stars for Fanney Khan.