Amol Palekar Grounds ‘Farzi’ and Shahid Kapoor Propels it Forward

Farzi

Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Vijay Sethupati, Kay Kay Menon, Amol Palekar, Raashi Khanna, Kubra Sait, Regina Cassandra, Chittranjan Giri

Direction: Raj & DK

Rating: ***1/2

Streaming on Amazon Prime

When Shahid Kapoor is good, he is very, very good.  

Raj & DK’s Farzi (Fake) has a stellar cast, but the eight-part series opens with Kapoor and closes with him, along with the promise of more seasons with Kapoor.

Shahid Kapoor is one of the few top Bollywood stars who can actually act, and he seems to be getting better with age. Now 41, laugh lines have settled to bracket his lips, his small eyes have crow’s feet, and he seems to have acquired a quiet confidence where he doesn’t need chamkile scenes and seeti-maro dialogue to simulate a filmy character. He does all the hard work of creating a character that is edgy, compelling, feels real but remains unpredictable with scenes that require him not to be front or centre. 

Though in Farzi a lot of very fine actors come and go in thrilling sequences – including Vijay Sethupati, Kay Kay Menon, Zakir Hussain and a delightful discovery, Bhuvan Arora – we stay with Farzi mostly because of Shahid Kapoor and Amol Palekar. The latter grounds the series with his old-world moral qualms, and the former propels it forward with his chutzpah, greed, ego and delinquency. 

In Farzi, Kapoor plays Sunny, a painter, an artist and the anti-hero. A master at creating exact imitations of masterpieces, he is talented but without purpose and prospects. 

He lives in Mumbai where he has a bachpan ka friend, Firoz (Bhuvan Arora), and his Nanu (Amol Palekar) who runs a janhit-mein-jaari Kranti Patrika that doesn’t sell but seeks to bring about change.

Sunny struggles to make money, and he can’t afford to pay the entry fee to an expensive nightclub where his rich girlfriend is partying.  

Suddenly, Sunny is faced with a desperate situation. 

Nanu’s printing press is facing an existential crisis. Sunny and Firoz try all the legal routes, but to no avail. So Sunny hits on a scheme, a scam actually, to mint money and save the patrika and the press.  

Elsewhere there is Mansoor Dalal (Kay Kay Menon), the kingpin of fake Indian currency, who lives in the Middle East, and Michael (Vijay Sethupati), who leads a Special Task Force and is single-minded in his pursuit of fake currency and Mansoor.

Both these characters have their own side stories with a rich ensemble of characters. 

Menon’s Mansoor gets some dramatic, gangster-type scenes with a campy wardrobe and lifestyle. He shines and makes the screen crackle.

Vijay Sethupati is an outstanding actor and there’s something about his screen presence that has starry charm and the assurance that all will be well in the end. Every time he is on the screen, there’s exciting anticipation that we are in for a thrilling treat. Though his chemistry and friction with a minister (played with delightful impatience and irritation by Zakir Hussain) is fun, his character is saddled with a sidetrack involving an estranged wife and a kid he misses. This tangent is dull, trite and despite Sethupati’s best efforts, it drags down the series. 

When that segment ends, and Michael is set free, the series’ pace accelerates and it acquires kinetic energy, ending in what’s becoming increasingly rare these days – a climax that makes binge-watching worthy of the time spent.

Farzi draws a lot of inspiration from Breaking Bad in its characters, plot and twists. 

Its hero has a unique talent, begins his criminal journey because of a desperate situation, but begins to enjoy it because of the power and money it gives him. He also gets a trusted accomplice in Firoz, a dogged cop on his trail, a loony rival and mild guilt about hiding his criminal enterprise from the very person for whom he did it in the first place. In Breaking Bad that was Walter White’s wife, Skyler; in Farzi, it’s Nanu.

Like Breaking Bad, Farzi‘s thrill lies in watching the underdog rise and realize the everyman fantasy of becoming rich and the master of his own destiny. 

Farzi has a nice background score and its trippy opening credits, where images split and morph in a dizzy, is very cool. It’s racy, pulpy, but unlike Breaking Bad, it keeps wagging a moral finger at Sunny to show that though it gets its kicks from Sunny’s illicit business, it has moral qualms.

Nanu, his values and the printing press together create the moral foundation from which Sunny’s story takes off. As the series progresses, we get a glimpse or two of the lengths Sunny will go to, to save himself and his jaali, farzi note enterprise. But the series backtracks quickly and returns to Nanu for a guilt-trip, making sure that our own moral unease at enjoying Sunny’s rise is addressed.  

At the end, Farzi sets Sunny free, taking away all moral encumbrances, and making him burn with rage and desire for revenge.

The series is sharply written and has deliberately left some untied threads, which will be activated and exploited to take the story forward when its second season is green-lit. I expect that to happen soon. 

With Farzi, things seem to be looking up again for OTT platforms. Or perhaps that’s what Raj & DK, or Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K., who have created their own very successful Bharat Bachao Andolan, first through The Family Man and now this, make us feel. 

In Farzi, they haven’t just pulled off a casting coup, but have made a series that’s pacy and tightly edited. Farzi has no dheela scenes, no extra fat, no wasted moments apart from Michael’s garelu kalesh.    

Apart from the very obvious Amar Akbar Anthony situation happening here with Mansoor, Firoz, Michael and Sunny, the series is cleverly written. Even Sunny’s romantic track (with Megha, played by Raashi Khanna) is woven nicely into the main plot.  

Though like most of their work, the male-female ratio in Farzi is skewed, all the actors in Farzi are excellent, and it was a delight to see Amol Palekar on the screen after such a long time.  

Farzi gets its mojo from its very talented cast, the world and characters that Raj and DK create, and Shahid Kapoor whose mix of acting and heropanti create a character we will see more of.