Faadu: A Love Story — Just brilliant

What is true love? In this brilliant study of love, poverty, poetry, ambition and corruption, love is when your girlfriend commutes to your home in the chawls for three hours by train to meet your family. When she reaches, the boyfriend asks, “Do you need to go to the washroom?” When she says yes, he personally cleans the only private toilet in the slums and then allows her in.I have no idea why Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s stupendously moving serial about the dreams and disenchantments of the working class has a strange name like Faadu: A Love Story. As I saw Abhay and Manjari’s romance and rift unfold across eleven eloquent episodes—and this is as good a place as any to state that Pavail Gulati and Saiyami Kher are beyond brilliant in the two roles — I thought of two wonderful films in the past: Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne and Raman Kumar’s Saath Saath, more the latter where Deepti Naval helplessly watched Farooq Sheikh’s idealism go down the drain.Saiyami Kher’s Manjiri too is a mute spectator to Pavail Gulati’s Abhay’s downfall. But don’t let her fragile looks fool you. She is a very strong woman. In the end, when her monstrously corrupted husband is about to go down she tells him what to do. “If you choose not to go to jail you will be trapped in a prison of guilt all your life with no one by your side. But if you go to jail, you will at least know there’s someone waiting for you outside.”Saumya Joshi’s writing is exceptionally evocative. She makes ordinary trite sentiments seem freshly rejuvenated and rendered magically relevant. Come to think of it. Faadu: A Love Story is a compendium of tried and tested clichés — idealistic poetess girl, overreacher dreamer boy and the deep chasm that divides their goals in life — about the romance of poverty beautifully positioned and reinvigorated by a team of technicians and actors who believe that some of the greatest songs ever sung are about the most pedestrian emotions of life.Director Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s attentive but never intrusive camera leans into the chawls not in the way Danny Boyle did in Slumdog Millionaire. Ashwini is not curious. This is not “poverty porn” for God’s sake. This is a world that exists right outside our window. We no longer acknowledge it. They are the invisible dreamers, scrounging, compromising, surviving…There are passages in this articulate paean to poverty that qualify as Great Cinema. The confrontation between Abhay and his simple father, who tells him a story about Alexander who wanted to conquer the world, and his Guru.“Who even knows Alexander’s guru’s name?” Abhay taunts his father (the brilliant Daya Shankar Pandey). This is the phase when Abhay’s moral downslide gathers momentum. He is falling and there is little Manjiri can do to stop him. Their collapse of communication is beautifully captured in Saiyami’s recriminating silences.The artful creation of the end of love is heartbreaking. Pavail Gulati plays Abhay Dubey with a casual intensity refraining from over-punctuating any of the character's blind spots. Gulati is brilliant, so is Kher. And the supporting cast is a killer: Abhilash Thapliyal as Abhay’s alcoholic brother, Deepak Sampat as Abhay’s cop-friend who won’t stoop to con karma, Girish Oak and the still lovely Ashwini Bhave as Manjiri’s rustic but progressive parents. They are a pleasure to behold.There is a lot to love in Faadu: A Love Story. In spite of its inordinate length, it possesses that one quality which Abhay rapidly loses. Equilibrium.Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.Read all the Latest News, Trending News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.