In Fida, which was released on 20 August twenty-one years ago, Ken Ghosh dared to innovate with a slick thriller that moved at breakneck speed to end at just under two hours. Ghosh’s audacious thriller was a triumphant home-coming for Hindi cinema at a time where any film under 180 minutes was automatically taken to be a ‘songless’ thriller. Ittefaq in 1969 and Bhoot in 2003 are two successful examples.
Fida is short, crisp and compelling without losing on commercial value. It has loads of Anu Malik’s zip-in-zip-out songs, tonnes of glamour (Kareena and Fardeen in a bath-tub as bubbles of all kinds blow across the film’s giddy frame), a dash of oomph (Kim Sharma, doing a short-skirt big-pout version of Karisma Kapoor in “Dil To Pagal Hai”) and slick production replete with eye-catching locales, sports cars… the works. But, above all, Fida has chutzpah.
Ken Ghosh dares to innovate with a slick thriller that moves at breakneck speed to end at just under two hours.
Looking back, Ken Ghosh says the film was ahead of its times. “As the Fida producer Ramesh Tauraniji says, it was ahead of its time. After that I promised to henceforth work on films that are with the time. Films that are ‘ahead if it’s time’ don’t get their due.”
Fida has chutzpah. Ken Ghosh, who made a minor ripple at the box office with his debut “Ishq Vishq”, is in a mood here to reverse many of the rules of formula filmmaking. There’s no conventional lead pair or a ‘Good Versus Evil’ format to sustain the battle. Fida is all about contemporary avarice and amorality. The three main characters, played by Kareena Kapoor, Shahid Kapoor and Fardeen Khan, are all dispossessed creatures driven single-mindedly by worldly passions. They all want to own the best things in life – and what’s wrong with that? Except their means of acquiring their dreams makes them ruthlessly self-serving.
Ghosh is a clever raconteur. His storytelling, though sporadically stymied by glaring loopholes, moves sinuously through the lives of his three characters, all playing a sinister and dangerous game that finally destroys their lives – collectively and individually.
The narrative is high-pitched, though blessedly devoid of hysteria. There are no snivelling sisters, no martyred mothers and bravura fathers… gosh! Where do Ghosh’s protagonists come from?! The plot doesn’t say so either. What the characters do with their lives in this ambition-driven thriller is of far more consequence than their antecedents.
Fida is the sort of tumbling, cascading, catch-your-breath-if-you-can thriller-on-the-run that could go wrong any second. Ken Ghosh’s split-second timing and perfectly cast set of actors, not to mention a soundtrack that’s saturated but never cluttered with edge-of-the-seat strategies, ensure an attentive audience.
Playing a designer version of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Kareena goes from artless seduction to heartless greed, to guilt pangs and finally remorseless surrender to her baser instincts. In the sequences depicting her moral degeneration, Kareena echoes Shabana Azmi in a long-forgotten film Log Kya Kahenge.
Kareena had her own explanation for why Fida didn’t work. During those times, she was seeing Shahid. “Because our roles were such. I played such a negative character, we weren’t supposed to be compatible at all. I don’t think we went wrong. The film didn’t work. But I don’t regret doing Fida. I enjoyed playing the villain. Priyanka Chopra has played the villain while I play the positive role in Aitraaz. I enjoyed playing the typical protective wife as much as I enjoyed playing the wanton woman in Fida. Every man wants a faithful wife like me in Aitraaz. Not too many men trust their wives these days. The reason Fida didn’t work was because audiences wanted to see us as a pair, not as enemies.”
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