Directed By: Homi Adajania
Written By: Homi Adajania; Kersi Khambatta
Cast:
Deepika Padukone – Angelina “Angie”
Naseeruddin Shah – Ferdinand “Ferdie” Pinto
Dimple Kapadia – Mrs. Rosalina “Rosie” Eucharistica
Arjun Kapoor – Savio Gama
Pankaj Kapur – Don Pedro Cleto Colaco
Anjali Patil – Stefanie “Fanny” Fernandes
Anand Tiwari – Church Father
Ranveer Singh – Gabo, Angie’s husband
Language: English; Hindi Genre: Dark comedy
Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny is a dark comedy with ironic undertones, set in a fictional village of Goa – Pocolim. It is a place where everyone seems to be preoccupied with the past, but not consciously. They are living their lives but only half. Time is an important factor in the movie, it doesn’t seem to pass but it passes. Also the characters seem like stock characters yet they grow into more rounded beings.
So when an undelivered love letter lands at Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah)’s doorstep, he recalls his passionate love for this girl Stefanie (Fanny), for whom he wrote the letter – but it never reached her. And the irony is Ferdie is the village postman. Suddenly there is possibility of a romance for Ferdie who lived in rejection thinking Stefanie never loved him but she just never knew. Angie (Deepika Padukone) decides to help him probably because she is vicariously living a romance that was denied her – her husband Gabo (Ranveer Singh) choked on their wedding cake and died.
They need Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur)’s car so the bait is Rosalina (Dimple Kapadia), Angie’s mother-in law, whose butt is of special fascination to him as he wanted to capture her on canvas. This motley group cannot be complete without a driver – Enter – Savio (Arjun Kapoor) who loved Angie but she had married his best friend. So they take off on this aimless journey which is probably metaphorical.
This aimless journey seems to be a quest. They are all looking for something and each character has something to hide. None of them seem to be what they are except for maybe Angie, who seems most willing among all of them for change to come in.
The group is trying to Find Fanny and that name is interesting because Fanny is also the American slang for ‘butt’ (the British use it to refer to something else but we are not entering that discussion). This might explain why Rosalina has a huge butt.
But what does Fanny really stand for? Is it a metaphor for love, romance or life? There is a Shelleyan preoccupation with death, something like his poem Ozymandias – the partially destroyed statue of a king in a lonely desert with an inscription proclaiming “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!” but what works?
The film trivialises death – the ever-present phenomenon; in fact in the very first 15 minutes of the film there is a death. So follow the trail of dead bodies to find fanny.
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