FAN (U/A)
Director: Maneesh Sharma
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Waluscha De Sousa, Sayani Gupta
Running time: 143 minutes

My father is a Rabindrasangeet-loving ex-banker who loves doing sudoku and watching cricket. Definitely not someone who looks like he could go loony about a movie star. But my grandmother had told me about this young boy who had gone to Bombay in the 1960s and torn a leaf from a tree in Dev Anand’s house and brought it back to Calcutta. The superstar wasn’t at home, so the fan had returned with a souvenir.

In the initial few minutes of Maneesh Sharma’s Fan, this absolute obsession for a movie star comes through beautifully. Gaurav Chandna runs a cyber cafe in Indra Vihar colony in Delhi but that’s really a sideshow as his source of daily sustenance is eating, sleeping, breathing, talking and being like Bollywood superstar Aryan Khanna. He has watched all his films a zillion times, his room is filled with his posters and being The Fan is clearly his only purpose in life.

Now, of course, the catch is: The fan doesn’t only behave like the star, he looks like him. “Aryan ko banane ke baad jo mitti bachi thi usse mujhe bana diya.” That “bachi hui mitti” is actually some prosthetics and a whole lot of VFX to make the same man look like two different men. [Or maybe not.] So, you have Shah Rukh Khan playing a man who is aping a fictional star resembling Shah Rukh Khan. That’s the big Khancept, the face-within-a-face Khanception!

The first act rolls out smoothly as Gaurav wins the local talent hunt show of his colony and with the prize money decides to go to Mumbai. Ticketless train travel, Room No. 205 in Hotel Delite... the “Photocopy” wants to retrace the steps his “Senior” took 25 years ago. But when he arrives in front of Aryan Khanna’s bungalow on the superstar’s birthday with a box of sohan halwa and the trophy he won back in Delhi, he realises he’s just a drop in the ocean of fans.

Till this point, Fan is rooted in reality. Not just because Gaurav’s antics are totally believable but also because Aryan Khanna, despite the name, is very much Shah Rukh Khan. After all there are clips used from Baazigar and Darr plus snippets from his old interviews and award wins, and that bungalow at Bandra Bandstand is clearly Mannat. And the Shah Rukh Khan can certainly have a fan this true, this mad, this deep. Even Maneesh’s treatment of the subject is fittingly sensitive, almost poetic. 

[The only thing bothering you at this stage is why doesn’t any other character in the film finds Gaurav to be a replica of Aryan.] 

Anyway, to jump out of that ocean and make a big splash, Gaurav beats up a Sid Kapoor, the other big star of the industry — remember Gunter Parche the Steffi Graf fanatic who stabbed Monica Seles? — and sends the video to Aryan as a birthday gift. All he wants in return is a five-minute meeting with his hero, maybe a selfie and a jhappi thrown in. But Aryan gets him beaten up by the cops and locked up for a couple of days. If that’s difficult to understand, he meets and tells Gaurav: “It’s my life and I won’t even give five seconds to you.”

That’s a desperate plot push, a convenient way to somehow extract a story out of the Khancept but it also takes out the suspension of disbelief in a snap. Everything that happens thereafter gets absurd, absurder, absurdest, as the fan turns foe overnight and decides to destroy the star. His modus operandi? Gaurav would pose as Aryan in public places and make a fool of himself, in true double-role status-swapping tradition in use right from The Great Dictator [and suddenly everybody would take him to be the star, including Aryan’s wife!].

What the silliness of the plot also does is dish out every SRK fan’s fantasies — from Shah Rukh Khan chasing Shah Rukh Khan on the streets of Dubrovnik to Shah Rukh Khan beating up Shah Rukh Khan on the roofs of Delhi. No romantic interest, no superhero villain, no ensemble cast, just unbridled, unhindered, unputdownable Shah Rukh Khan.

And the man is in terrific form. Especially as The Fan. With those VFX cheekbones Shah Rukh sinks his fake protruding teeth into the role of the crazy fan with emphatic elan and infectious energy. The talk, the walk, the smile, the laugh... there’s not a trace of the starry mannerisms in Gaurav making him markedly different from the Aryan avatar. This SRK performance is right up there with Swades and Chak De! India.

You only wish Gaurav was in a better film. A film which didn’t resort to stupidity just to serve the Khancept and get entangled in a ‘fan’tastic moral dilemma in the end. Fanatics wouldn’t mind. Fans would know.

Pratim D. Gupta
Do you agree with the review that Fan is one of SRK’s three best acts?
Tell t2@abp.in