I saw Fanaa again...
Jun. 6th, 2006 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieI saw Fanaa again.
My God. My God.
Most of the time, the first time I watch the movie is the best. I don’t know how things will turn out, or if I do, I don’t know the details and the manner of events. And the second time is nice, but not usually as fun. But rarely, if the movie really gets me, if it’s really good, if I fall in love with it, the second time is better. And such was the case with Fanaa. Knowing the story, knowing what was going to happen allowed me to relax, to immerse myself in the feel, in the little things. And knowing what was coming made me more emotional even than the first time.
Kajol broke my heart. Aamir made me bawl. This watch of Fanaa broke a record of my own: I started crying before the intermission. But it’s just Kajol’s pain, the way she is when she realizes Rehan is dead that just broke my heart. Kajol is one of the very rare actresses that can make me feel what she feels, draws me in to the point where it ceases to be a fictional story. She is surreally beautifully warm, but it’s not that. It’s something in the voice, in the eyes. If there was ever a woman a man would want to give his life for, who could restore a soul of a person like Rehan, it would be Zooni.
And as to Aamir? Someone on Bollywhat posted a pretty positive review of Fanaa, but said that the movie was all Kajol’s and that Aamir was merely OK and many actors could have played the role better. And I realize people see movies differently, but I can’t really wrap my brain about this comment. If Kajol was the soul of this movie, Aamir was its heart. I cannot imagine anyone else portraying Rehan, making me hate him one moment, pity him the next, and love him like a giddy teenager the moment after that. And if nothing else, Fanaa does show how futile all those SRK/Aamir debates are. People always love to compare and contrast the two, but you simply cannot. They are both so good at what they do, and yet so utterly different. Fanaa is the closest Aamir has come in years to doing an out and out romantic movie. With the possible exception of QSQT (his first movie!!!), Fanaa is the most epic tragic romance he’s ever done, thus the closest he’s ever come to SRK’s ‘territory.’ And still, the roles are utterly different. I cannot imagine SRK playing Rehan any more than (if the ads in any way correspond to the movie) I can see Aamir play SRK’s role in KANK.
But to (temporarily) get back to Zooni. I love her. She is probably one of my favorite Bollywood heroines, not just because she is portrayed as someone selflessly pure of heart (but not in a cloying saintly way) but because she is strong and not hiding behind her disability. She can joke about it, she references it, she is strong because of it. And after all, it is only realistic that she would be like that: she grew up in a loving home, close to her parents and sheltered, but not too sheltered, her father’s over protectiveness contained by her mother. No wonder she is so playful and open in the first half. And no wonder that after her trials she is still strong but more contained in the second half. I know a lot of people didn’t care for it, but I loved Chamda Chamke for its glimpse of unalloyed joy in the grim tragedy of the second half, seeing Aamir smile (and he has such a beautiful smile, it transforms his face), seeing Kajol back to vibrant, irrepressible girl she really is. Her madcap fun never feels forced, just organic and beautiful.
I loved the poetry, the couplets Aamir and Kajol kept reciting to each other. They were beautiful and really gave the movie an amazingly different, passionate feel. And there are all those shades of foreshadowing throughout the first half which made me want to cry. One of her friends telling Kajol when describing Aamir “he is a real killer, girl, a real killer.” Indeed. And I didn’t notice the first time how much imagery there was in Chand Sirfarish of Aamir singing about destroying himself in ‘you’ (Zooni). I love Chand Sirfarish. You know you love a movie when listening to the song makes you cry. But it’s such a passionate, beautiful song and I love the really sexy way he is ‘stalking’ her. I love the song in the rain, as I think it’s the sexiest song ever. And then there is Mere Haath Mein which just might replace “Suraj Hua Maddam” as my favorite picturization ever. It’s beautiful and haunting and hot, and he kneels to her, but what I love the most is when he just holds her on the bed and he just is falling apart, shaking, crying, her arms tight about him, and him holding on for dear life. I think it’s so painful the way thawing is: he is not used to feeling, to allowing himself to feel, to be human.
I love watching Aamir interact with Kajol in the first half. You get the sense that he knows he should not be pursuing her (why not settle on an easier, more compliant target? Why have one at all, he has the same access just being a tour guide?), but you get the feeling he is thinking “just this one more minute, one more day, one more conversation can’t hurt, I’ll break it off tomorrow” and he just can’t help but give in to emotion. And I love the way she hugs him the first time: it’s awkward, unpracticed, she’s never held a man before. And her total trust and openness terrify him. I love their conversation on the bench when she finds him out to tell him she loves him. She demolishes his barriers one by one, and you can tell that even as he fights to drive her away, how hard he wants to give in, how he cannot really truly drive her away, like a thirsty man with a spring in the desert. And when he promises her that night, you know he is thinking “one more half a day, just one more and than it ends” and he is deluding himself, and its self-justification, but I think not coming for her that final morning took all the self-control he had and he doesn’t have any reserves left any more. He tries to fight but it’s a desperately losing battle. But then any straight man faced with Kajol pleading him to love her, no strings attached, would be inhuman to refuse. And then, after it all, he takes her off the train, even though he knows their time is limited, but he must have all he can. And I think it’s so symbolic that she was able to leave him, even as it broke her heart, but he was the one who couldn’t let go (just as it’s symbolic that Zooni is blind in the first half, just as she is blind to Rehan’s true nature, and in the second half she can see and finds out the truth about him. Or alternatively that Zooni’s blindness allows her to see Rehan’s true heart and nature, one he hides even from himself). I think he wants to believe he can play husband and wife, he deludes himself into doing that, even as he knows it’s impossible. He is good at pretending, even to himself. The thing with Rehan, is that someone like him has to, on one level, believe the roles he plays, because otherwise it wouldn’t be convincing to others, but it has to mess you up pretty badly. And of course, the fact that he then has to betray all those people is more messed-upness. I love it when he admits to his son he is not dependable. But the real tragedy is he wishes he could be. He knows he is broken. I love that conversation between Kajol and Aamir in his room where he tells her he doesn’t know the person inside the soldier, because sometimes, in order to know yourself, you have to see yourself through someone else’s eyes and he was never able to get this close to anyone. And that is perhaps the saddest thing about this whole story and Aamir’s wasted life (and tells an interesting story about Aamir’s grandfather. Aamir really is a tool first, valued only for his contribution to the cause, and family not at all).
I loved it when she touches his face to know it, in the first half, and describes it: it’s such crazy chemistry (I have never noticed before this movie what a sexy, deep, expressive voice Aamir has. Which only makes sense since Zooni is blind and voice is such a large part of how she sees him). And I love his last good-bye to her before the surgery: he knows he is bidding good-bye to his heart and to any scrap of humanity he was able to achieve. Zooni is his humanity and he’s left her. But of course that is not true, is it? He tears up her photograph (even as he admits he fell in love with her) in the airport but he cannot escape (a complete non sequitur. I just love that shot: as Tyagi describes the IKF mastermind, you hear music with a strong beat and the camera shows impeccable black shoes and pants and coat and a back of someone’s head with a very short haircut and then it swims around and you see Aamir, focused face, glasses, contained look. Whoa! Also, I think he has the prettiest mouth, but that’s a separate matter entirely). Because there he is, on her doorstep.
And I think being there, in that house, is his punishment, his very own special hell. He sees how he has hurt those who are his, those he loves (the look on his face as Rehan Jr. announces ‘dead man made Mom cry,’ or the way he looks when he sorts through various parts of faces Zooni tried to put together in order to make Rehan of her memory. It’s even deeper than remorse, it’s despair and guilt). And worse than that, he sees what he could have had if he stayed, what could be his and he can’t touch it. He sees Zooni loving to her son, he sees his child (I love how when the kid tries to sit next to him, Aamir keeps moving away. I think it’s pure panic of sensory overload), he sees their love and fun and normalcy and sanity and it’s the life he’s denied himself and it’s his own doing and all he can do is press his nose against the glass.
Btw, love the scene where she touches his chest when he is unconscious and gets a bit of a recognition. I don’t think she recognizes the beat of his heart, but the feel of his chest? Considering that it’s likely the only male chest she’s ever touched? I liked that it makes her pause for a second. And I like that she doesn’t recognize him at once because of it
When their life wears down his walls (for the second time, no less), and he begs Kajol’s forgiveness, I think he wants forgiveness almost as much as he wants to be taken back, because you can see how heavy his burden of guilt is. And I love that he is unwilling to lie to them, and tells them he can’t tell them what his mission is and that he doesn’t want to lie. And when he cries, completely emotionally open and vulnerable to her, asking her to take him back and forgive him even though “I don’t deserve forgiveness,” I, girly girl that I am, start crying with him. And I love it when she runs after him, and she hits him and he stretches his arms out uncertainly, unable and unsure of his right to touch her, and then his arms go around her and hers around him and he holds her like a person drowning, a person reprieved who can’t believe it. But of course, it’s short-lived. I love Aamir in the shower after Rishi’s death: it’s as if, Lady Macbeth-like, he is trying to wash away the sin and the blood. (Also, kudos to the make-up people. After running after Zooni to the Colonel’s house, the guy looks frost-bitten. Surely it’s wrong but I kept thinking “dry your hair first before chasing after her!”). And the tragedy of them is, if he only could let go. She still loves him after everything. When he tells her Rishi’s death was an accident, you can see the huger on her face to believe him. When he pleads about the part, you can see she believes him, but of course it’s not enough.
I loved the little kid, by the way. When he tells Zooni that “the man left and said good bye to me and not to you” it’s such a childish way to get back at someone (in this case his mother) who was not nice to you. And he makes Aamir smile, and he needs a father figure so badly, and I love the way Aamir hugs and holds him before he leaves after revealing himself to Kajol. Rehan Jr is really all the innocence that Rehan himself has lost. I just love the contrast between the child’s toy plastic gun and Aamir’s real one, the child’s poison which is milk with tumeric and Aamir’s very real and deadly poison. I think his wife and child really are Aamir’s lost soul.
I loved Zooni’s parents. They are so real and lovely. Her romantic mother, her father who is all about caring for his little girl (Rishi was great in the role. His face when he sees Zooni can see made me burst into tears. Again). What a contrast to whatever upbringing Rehan must have had (and pretty horrible it must have been). When Aamir is about to leave to transmit his coordinates, and he is sitting at the breakfast table, all strung out with nerves and a bit of hope (I love that Aamir can portray that without any words. Both he and Kajol have insanely expressive faces), and Zooni is making up a fairy tale for Rehan Jr because she wants to tell stories again, and she talks about a blind princess and a common man who was a prince in disguise whose name was Rehan, and talks about him rescuing her from a dragon, the kid asks her what the dragon’s name is and when Zooni pauses, Aamir quietly says “Grandfather.” And at first I thought he meant Rishi, but this time it struck me that what he means is his grandfather, the grandfather who brought up Aamir to be such a destroyed person, who would have no qualms about killing Aamir and Kajol and their son. And I think that comment ties in with Rehan’s increasingly complex motivations about turning over that part: he sees himself as protecting them. It went from being political to being largely personal for him.
But then that makes sense, doesn’t he? Despite all his talk in the first half of being driven by needs and not emotions, not believing in love, that is so not true. Rehan is not pragmatic at all. He might be pragmatic about his means, but his goals are hardly those a pure pragmatist would come up with. A pragmatist would sit tight and enjoy the status quo, not risk his life and that of the others for an abstract goal. Rehan is a twisted idealist. He is all about emotion, that emotion ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. Not only does he put his own life repeatedly at naught, he destroys others, and he is not a sociopath who doesn’t care. You can see how he loathes what he has to become, what he does. Just watch him turn around to face the Colonel Uncle, tears in his eyes, and the dead-weary, self-loathing look on his face. But it’s not just Zooni who’s had a softening influence on him. He is that way earlier: you can see he hates the violence in the first half, or the early part of the second. He is weary of it. But his belief in his goal overrides everything. And he knows he is damned: look at the way he asks her in the first half ‘how can you love me this much?’ In a life full of betrayal and untruth, something as pure as Zooni’s love must seem a mirage to him (I don’t think he’s ever got unconditional love in his life, actually). He tries to make what he does as normal as he can: his talk about all the conquerors playing bloody games (during his private tour with Zooni) is in a way positioning himself in a historical context, indirectly saying he is only doing what all rulers have done through history; his view of himself as a solider also is an attempt at normalizing what he does; his talk to the dying solider on the helicopter about his dying the death of a brave soldier and that heaven awaits him is I think something he has to believe in order to continue with what he does, but that rationing is fraying at the seams.
So Rehan is a man who is actually willing to destroy himself for something he believes in, for emotion. He is willing to submerge and negate himself. And so all it needs is for his goals to switch. When his focus switches from IKF to loving Zooni and his family, he is just as totally single-minded about it as he was about blowing buildings up before. It seems so in character.
The movie makes me utterly sad for Rehan. What a waste! Brought up differently, he could have been a splendid person: he is certainly intelligent and has a deep reserve of emotion. But it all got twisted and messed up and there is no way out for him. It’s too late for him even when he meets Zooni. The ending scene, in the snow, is the best possible outcome for him. There was no way out for him but death (even if the Indian army didn’t get him, or Zooni could forgive him for her father’s death. His grandfather was not going to let him go, and I doubt even Rehan really believed he could be free that way. His stubborn insistence becomes more and more structured. He is clinging to the path he’d thought out with more and more tenacity because it becomes more and more unworkable and he doesn’t want to face that, he is more desperate and strung out). But watching that final scene in the snow with Rehan and Zooni breaks my heart into tiny teeny pieces, even more so than the first time, because I realized this time, that when he throws away his gun, he knows she will kill him, and he wants that, and he keeps walking because he knows there is no way out and to be destroyed for her (and by her) is what he must do for her. And then of course her dropping the gun and yelling his name, and running to him. And his head on her lap, and it’s such a tragic mirror of the end of Mere Haath Mein, and he smiles at her, as if that is what he wanted (and I think it was) and he tells her “Rehan loves Zooni more than Zooni loves Rehan” and she tells him not to say that and he tells her he is not afraid any more (and I do think he was driven by fear so much throughout. Fear of opening up to Zooni, fear of losing her, fear of failing his mission, fear fear and more fear). And he dies and she SCREAMS his name. Needless to say I was sobbing by that point. I think Fanaa is a lot more of a ‘love legend’ than Veer-Zaara, even though VZ (which I adore) is the one who has that tag. It’s the inevitable tragedy of the ending. This is a movie where I kept hoping, even though I knew it was futile, for the ending to be different, for things to work out, even the second time. How crazy is that? But of course, the final scene, with Zooni and her son at the grave, and the lost, shattered look on Zooni’s face, her saying “Zooni loves Rehan very much,” and an uncertain, lost smile as the camera pulls back which shows how lost she is more than crying would, was inevitable.
Must see it again. And I got a Fanaa poster. Yay!
My God. My God.
Most of the time, the first time I watch the movie is the best. I don’t know how things will turn out, or if I do, I don’t know the details and the manner of events. And the second time is nice, but not usually as fun. But rarely, if the movie really gets me, if it’s really good, if I fall in love with it, the second time is better. And such was the case with Fanaa. Knowing the story, knowing what was going to happen allowed me to relax, to immerse myself in the feel, in the little things. And knowing what was coming made me more emotional even than the first time.
Kajol broke my heart. Aamir made me bawl. This watch of Fanaa broke a record of my own: I started crying before the intermission. But it’s just Kajol’s pain, the way she is when she realizes Rehan is dead that just broke my heart. Kajol is one of the very rare actresses that can make me feel what she feels, draws me in to the point where it ceases to be a fictional story. She is surreally beautifully warm, but it’s not that. It’s something in the voice, in the eyes. If there was ever a woman a man would want to give his life for, who could restore a soul of a person like Rehan, it would be Zooni.
And as to Aamir? Someone on Bollywhat posted a pretty positive review of Fanaa, but said that the movie was all Kajol’s and that Aamir was merely OK and many actors could have played the role better. And I realize people see movies differently, but I can’t really wrap my brain about this comment. If Kajol was the soul of this movie, Aamir was its heart. I cannot imagine anyone else portraying Rehan, making me hate him one moment, pity him the next, and love him like a giddy teenager the moment after that. And if nothing else, Fanaa does show how futile all those SRK/Aamir debates are. People always love to compare and contrast the two, but you simply cannot. They are both so good at what they do, and yet so utterly different. Fanaa is the closest Aamir has come in years to doing an out and out romantic movie. With the possible exception of QSQT (his first movie!!!), Fanaa is the most epic tragic romance he’s ever done, thus the closest he’s ever come to SRK’s ‘territory.’ And still, the roles are utterly different. I cannot imagine SRK playing Rehan any more than (if the ads in any way correspond to the movie) I can see Aamir play SRK’s role in KANK.
But to (temporarily) get back to Zooni. I love her. She is probably one of my favorite Bollywood heroines, not just because she is portrayed as someone selflessly pure of heart (but not in a cloying saintly way) but because she is strong and not hiding behind her disability. She can joke about it, she references it, she is strong because of it. And after all, it is only realistic that she would be like that: she grew up in a loving home, close to her parents and sheltered, but not too sheltered, her father’s over protectiveness contained by her mother. No wonder she is so playful and open in the first half. And no wonder that after her trials she is still strong but more contained in the second half. I know a lot of people didn’t care for it, but I loved Chamda Chamke for its glimpse of unalloyed joy in the grim tragedy of the second half, seeing Aamir smile (and he has such a beautiful smile, it transforms his face), seeing Kajol back to vibrant, irrepressible girl she really is. Her madcap fun never feels forced, just organic and beautiful.
I loved the poetry, the couplets Aamir and Kajol kept reciting to each other. They were beautiful and really gave the movie an amazingly different, passionate feel. And there are all those shades of foreshadowing throughout the first half which made me want to cry. One of her friends telling Kajol when describing Aamir “he is a real killer, girl, a real killer.” Indeed. And I didn’t notice the first time how much imagery there was in Chand Sirfarish of Aamir singing about destroying himself in ‘you’ (Zooni). I love Chand Sirfarish. You know you love a movie when listening to the song makes you cry. But it’s such a passionate, beautiful song and I love the really sexy way he is ‘stalking’ her. I love the song in the rain, as I think it’s the sexiest song ever. And then there is Mere Haath Mein which just might replace “Suraj Hua Maddam” as my favorite picturization ever. It’s beautiful and haunting and hot, and he kneels to her, but what I love the most is when he just holds her on the bed and he just is falling apart, shaking, crying, her arms tight about him, and him holding on for dear life. I think it’s so painful the way thawing is: he is not used to feeling, to allowing himself to feel, to be human.
I love watching Aamir interact with Kajol in the first half. You get the sense that he knows he should not be pursuing her (why not settle on an easier, more compliant target? Why have one at all, he has the same access just being a tour guide?), but you get the feeling he is thinking “just this one more minute, one more day, one more conversation can’t hurt, I’ll break it off tomorrow” and he just can’t help but give in to emotion. And I love the way she hugs him the first time: it’s awkward, unpracticed, she’s never held a man before. And her total trust and openness terrify him. I love their conversation on the bench when she finds him out to tell him she loves him. She demolishes his barriers one by one, and you can tell that even as he fights to drive her away, how hard he wants to give in, how he cannot really truly drive her away, like a thirsty man with a spring in the desert. And when he promises her that night, you know he is thinking “one more half a day, just one more and than it ends” and he is deluding himself, and its self-justification, but I think not coming for her that final morning took all the self-control he had and he doesn’t have any reserves left any more. He tries to fight but it’s a desperately losing battle. But then any straight man faced with Kajol pleading him to love her, no strings attached, would be inhuman to refuse. And then, after it all, he takes her off the train, even though he knows their time is limited, but he must have all he can. And I think it’s so symbolic that she was able to leave him, even as it broke her heart, but he was the one who couldn’t let go (just as it’s symbolic that Zooni is blind in the first half, just as she is blind to Rehan’s true nature, and in the second half she can see and finds out the truth about him. Or alternatively that Zooni’s blindness allows her to see Rehan’s true heart and nature, one he hides even from himself). I think he wants to believe he can play husband and wife, he deludes himself into doing that, even as he knows it’s impossible. He is good at pretending, even to himself. The thing with Rehan, is that someone like him has to, on one level, believe the roles he plays, because otherwise it wouldn’t be convincing to others, but it has to mess you up pretty badly. And of course, the fact that he then has to betray all those people is more messed-upness. I love it when he admits to his son he is not dependable. But the real tragedy is he wishes he could be. He knows he is broken. I love that conversation between Kajol and Aamir in his room where he tells her he doesn’t know the person inside the soldier, because sometimes, in order to know yourself, you have to see yourself through someone else’s eyes and he was never able to get this close to anyone. And that is perhaps the saddest thing about this whole story and Aamir’s wasted life (and tells an interesting story about Aamir’s grandfather. Aamir really is a tool first, valued only for his contribution to the cause, and family not at all).
I loved it when she touches his face to know it, in the first half, and describes it: it’s such crazy chemistry (I have never noticed before this movie what a sexy, deep, expressive voice Aamir has. Which only makes sense since Zooni is blind and voice is such a large part of how she sees him). And I love his last good-bye to her before the surgery: he knows he is bidding good-bye to his heart and to any scrap of humanity he was able to achieve. Zooni is his humanity and he’s left her. But of course that is not true, is it? He tears up her photograph (even as he admits he fell in love with her) in the airport but he cannot escape (a complete non sequitur. I just love that shot: as Tyagi describes the IKF mastermind, you hear music with a strong beat and the camera shows impeccable black shoes and pants and coat and a back of someone’s head with a very short haircut and then it swims around and you see Aamir, focused face, glasses, contained look. Whoa! Also, I think he has the prettiest mouth, but that’s a separate matter entirely). Because there he is, on her doorstep.
And I think being there, in that house, is his punishment, his very own special hell. He sees how he has hurt those who are his, those he loves (the look on his face as Rehan Jr. announces ‘dead man made Mom cry,’ or the way he looks when he sorts through various parts of faces Zooni tried to put together in order to make Rehan of her memory. It’s even deeper than remorse, it’s despair and guilt). And worse than that, he sees what he could have had if he stayed, what could be his and he can’t touch it. He sees Zooni loving to her son, he sees his child (I love how when the kid tries to sit next to him, Aamir keeps moving away. I think it’s pure panic of sensory overload), he sees their love and fun and normalcy and sanity and it’s the life he’s denied himself and it’s his own doing and all he can do is press his nose against the glass.
Btw, love the scene where she touches his chest when he is unconscious and gets a bit of a recognition. I don’t think she recognizes the beat of his heart, but the feel of his chest? Considering that it’s likely the only male chest she’s ever touched? I liked that it makes her pause for a second. And I like that she doesn’t recognize him at once because of it
When their life wears down his walls (for the second time, no less), and he begs Kajol’s forgiveness, I think he wants forgiveness almost as much as he wants to be taken back, because you can see how heavy his burden of guilt is. And I love that he is unwilling to lie to them, and tells them he can’t tell them what his mission is and that he doesn’t want to lie. And when he cries, completely emotionally open and vulnerable to her, asking her to take him back and forgive him even though “I don’t deserve forgiveness,” I, girly girl that I am, start crying with him. And I love it when she runs after him, and she hits him and he stretches his arms out uncertainly, unable and unsure of his right to touch her, and then his arms go around her and hers around him and he holds her like a person drowning, a person reprieved who can’t believe it. But of course, it’s short-lived. I love Aamir in the shower after Rishi’s death: it’s as if, Lady Macbeth-like, he is trying to wash away the sin and the blood. (Also, kudos to the make-up people. After running after Zooni to the Colonel’s house, the guy looks frost-bitten. Surely it’s wrong but I kept thinking “dry your hair first before chasing after her!”). And the tragedy of them is, if he only could let go. She still loves him after everything. When he tells her Rishi’s death was an accident, you can see the huger on her face to believe him. When he pleads about the part, you can see she believes him, but of course it’s not enough.
I loved the little kid, by the way. When he tells Zooni that “the man left and said good bye to me and not to you” it’s such a childish way to get back at someone (in this case his mother) who was not nice to you. And he makes Aamir smile, and he needs a father figure so badly, and I love the way Aamir hugs and holds him before he leaves after revealing himself to Kajol. Rehan Jr is really all the innocence that Rehan himself has lost. I just love the contrast between the child’s toy plastic gun and Aamir’s real one, the child’s poison which is milk with tumeric and Aamir’s very real and deadly poison. I think his wife and child really are Aamir’s lost soul.
I loved Zooni’s parents. They are so real and lovely. Her romantic mother, her father who is all about caring for his little girl (Rishi was great in the role. His face when he sees Zooni can see made me burst into tears. Again). What a contrast to whatever upbringing Rehan must have had (and pretty horrible it must have been). When Aamir is about to leave to transmit his coordinates, and he is sitting at the breakfast table, all strung out with nerves and a bit of hope (I love that Aamir can portray that without any words. Both he and Kajol have insanely expressive faces), and Zooni is making up a fairy tale for Rehan Jr because she wants to tell stories again, and she talks about a blind princess and a common man who was a prince in disguise whose name was Rehan, and talks about him rescuing her from a dragon, the kid asks her what the dragon’s name is and when Zooni pauses, Aamir quietly says “Grandfather.” And at first I thought he meant Rishi, but this time it struck me that what he means is his grandfather, the grandfather who brought up Aamir to be such a destroyed person, who would have no qualms about killing Aamir and Kajol and their son. And I think that comment ties in with Rehan’s increasingly complex motivations about turning over that part: he sees himself as protecting them. It went from being political to being largely personal for him.
But then that makes sense, doesn’t he? Despite all his talk in the first half of being driven by needs and not emotions, not believing in love, that is so not true. Rehan is not pragmatic at all. He might be pragmatic about his means, but his goals are hardly those a pure pragmatist would come up with. A pragmatist would sit tight and enjoy the status quo, not risk his life and that of the others for an abstract goal. Rehan is a twisted idealist. He is all about emotion, that emotion ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. Not only does he put his own life repeatedly at naught, he destroys others, and he is not a sociopath who doesn’t care. You can see how he loathes what he has to become, what he does. Just watch him turn around to face the Colonel Uncle, tears in his eyes, and the dead-weary, self-loathing look on his face. But it’s not just Zooni who’s had a softening influence on him. He is that way earlier: you can see he hates the violence in the first half, or the early part of the second. He is weary of it. But his belief in his goal overrides everything. And he knows he is damned: look at the way he asks her in the first half ‘how can you love me this much?’ In a life full of betrayal and untruth, something as pure as Zooni’s love must seem a mirage to him (I don’t think he’s ever got unconditional love in his life, actually). He tries to make what he does as normal as he can: his talk about all the conquerors playing bloody games (during his private tour with Zooni) is in a way positioning himself in a historical context, indirectly saying he is only doing what all rulers have done through history; his view of himself as a solider also is an attempt at normalizing what he does; his talk to the dying solider on the helicopter about his dying the death of a brave soldier and that heaven awaits him is I think something he has to believe in order to continue with what he does, but that rationing is fraying at the seams.
So Rehan is a man who is actually willing to destroy himself for something he believes in, for emotion. He is willing to submerge and negate himself. And so all it needs is for his goals to switch. When his focus switches from IKF to loving Zooni and his family, he is just as totally single-minded about it as he was about blowing buildings up before. It seems so in character.
The movie makes me utterly sad for Rehan. What a waste! Brought up differently, he could have been a splendid person: he is certainly intelligent and has a deep reserve of emotion. But it all got twisted and messed up and there is no way out for him. It’s too late for him even when he meets Zooni. The ending scene, in the snow, is the best possible outcome for him. There was no way out for him but death (even if the Indian army didn’t get him, or Zooni could forgive him for her father’s death. His grandfather was not going to let him go, and I doubt even Rehan really believed he could be free that way. His stubborn insistence becomes more and more structured. He is clinging to the path he’d thought out with more and more tenacity because it becomes more and more unworkable and he doesn’t want to face that, he is more desperate and strung out). But watching that final scene in the snow with Rehan and Zooni breaks my heart into tiny teeny pieces, even more so than the first time, because I realized this time, that when he throws away his gun, he knows she will kill him, and he wants that, and he keeps walking because he knows there is no way out and to be destroyed for her (and by her) is what he must do for her. And then of course her dropping the gun and yelling his name, and running to him. And his head on her lap, and it’s such a tragic mirror of the end of Mere Haath Mein, and he smiles at her, as if that is what he wanted (and I think it was) and he tells her “Rehan loves Zooni more than Zooni loves Rehan” and she tells him not to say that and he tells her he is not afraid any more (and I do think he was driven by fear so much throughout. Fear of opening up to Zooni, fear of losing her, fear of failing his mission, fear fear and more fear). And he dies and she SCREAMS his name. Needless to say I was sobbing by that point. I think Fanaa is a lot more of a ‘love legend’ than Veer-Zaara, even though VZ (which I adore) is the one who has that tag. It’s the inevitable tragedy of the ending. This is a movie where I kept hoping, even though I knew it was futile, for the ending to be different, for things to work out, even the second time. How crazy is that? But of course, the final scene, with Zooni and her son at the grave, and the lost, shattered look on Zooni’s face, her saying “Zooni loves Rehan very much,” and an uncertain, lost smile as the camera pulls back which shows how lost she is more than crying would, was inevitable.
Must see it again. And I got a Fanaa poster. Yay!
