Fitoor (Hindi)
Director: Abhishek Kapoor
Cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Katrina Kaif, Tabu, Aditi Rao Hydari, Rahul Bhatt, Lara Dutta, Ajay Devgn
As is quite clear from its title, Fitoor (obsession) is a love story. The poor but artistic Kashmiri boy Noor (Aditya Roy Kapur) falls in love with rich and haughty Firdaus (Katrina Kaif). They get together, move apart and then get back together again. However, they leave the viewers rather cold and unconcerned despite mouthing lines like “ khud se azaad ya to maut karti hai ya ishq (You can get liberation from the self through either death or love).
Fitoor wants desperately to be a grand, epic romance but depends way too much on its stunning Kashmir canvas to achieve it rather than its story or characters.
Though inspired by Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations , the film, unlike the novel, neither makes you flow along, without question, with the sequence of events, nor makes you root for the protagonists and their class struggles.
The proceedings flummox, the happenstance baffles and the leading characters and their motivations remain utterly unconvincing.
Visually, the landscape of Kashmir is sanitised of both militants and the armed forces. There are throwaway references, lines like “ sabko jannat ke hisse chahiye ” (everyone wants a piece of heaven) and an odd bomb blast, but largely what we see is an airbrushed, gorgeous Kashmir. Can you depoliticise Kashmir and yet not quite let go of it for your plot’s convenience? Katrina is good so long as she has to just be herself. So she dances, smiles and flirts well, but the minute a dramatic scene comes up, her utter inadequacy as a performer shows. Aditya has to look completely mesmerised by her and deeply unhappy in love, and he does so adequately. Tabu’s Begum is a world of her own, often hard to fathom, but she holds the viewer in her grasp, and Fitoor ultimately turns out to be her film, not Noor’s or Firdaus’s. It’s her enduring love that has more pain and intensity than the plastic emotions of the film’s lead characters. Or the director’s love for the Kashmir panorama for that matter.
— NAMRATA JOSHI
The proceedings flummox and the characters and their motivations remain utterly unconvincing
