Artlessly benign ‘comedy’!

There was a time when some of our scriptwriters would plagiarise, or recreate scenes straight from a popular foreign film, and get away with it. In terms of passing off somebody else’s hard work as one’s own was easy, only because rarely anybody from the original team got wind of it. In the age of digital world though, things changed and so now an idea is no longer lifted, and a film gets officially remade in another language.

But “buying” the rights of an interesting premise alone cannot warrant a successful film in another adaptation. It seems that when producers TSeries, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and a host of others, decided to buy rights of the 2002 Belgian film Everybody’s Famous!, and launched Fanney Khan, they thought more than half the battle was won since the original film had been nominated for a bunch of awards and had even won a few. Only if they knew that a funny idea also demands funny execution and a believable script.

Prashant Kumar, also known as “Fanney Khan” (Anil Kapoor), works in a factory, is a part-time vocalist in an orchestra, models himself after his ideal Mohammed Rafi and dreams of becoming a singer, but dwindles due to failed circumstances. Years later, his dream gets fuelled when he, an obsessive middle-aged father, is fanatically convinced that his young, aspiring and overweight teenage-daughter has enormous talent.

However, contrary to his plans, Lata fails in making an impact on any musical show she participates in, and is booed upon due to her weight. He has differences with her on other matters as well, such as the choice of songs that he wants Lata to sing. Being young she has fresh ways and means to live her life the way she wants to. She dreams of becoming a star; just like her ideal, the well-known soloist, gorgeous diva Baby Singh (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan). Things go from bad to worse when he loses his job and has to put up an act of going to work every day. Thrown into dire circumstances and trying hard to figure out how to support his family, he leans on his good friend (Satish Kaushik) to hire him as a cab driver. It is in such a crucial turn that richness or bankruptcy of ideas clearly shows up in any film. Both director Atul Manjrekar and his team fail miserably in creating a flow of convincing moments. The writer is a film critic and has been reviewing films for over 15 years. He also writes on music, art and

culture, and other human interest stories.