Starring Shahid Kapoor and Vijay Sethupathi in his Hindi debut, Farzi tracks a down-on-his-luck artist turned currency counterfeiter and a police officer with a chequered past. Shahid plays Sunny, who makes a little money selling his artwork and spends most of his time helping run his adoptive grandfather’s (Amol Palekar) flailing political magazine. Vijay Sethupathi (or VJS as he’s often referred to) is Michael Vedanayagam, hell-bent on bringing an end to the counterfeit note racket in the country. Overall, Farzi is an engaging thriller with messy politics, except when the emotional and romantic tracks bring the pacing to a soulless drag.
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, more commonly known as Raj & DK, are returning with Farzi nearly two years after the release of season 2 of The Family Man web series. The series’ vilifying portrayal of Eelam Tamils and the brown-facing of their lead actor Samantha in the role of a Tamil woman, drew widespread criticism. So some viewers, this reviewer included, was keen to see the role written for Vijay Sethupathi in Farzi.
The show does good work setting up how and why a small-time artist gets involved in counterfeiting money. It also successfully spins a bigger story around the dizzying nexus of criminals, corrupt politicians, and bureaucratic machinery that blur into each other, enabling such endeavours. The show at least starts off trying to make this a battle between loners, each convinced they are undermining the ‘system’. It even offers an interesting minor antagonist in the form of a performatively patriotic politician, constantly chasing headlines that can help him clinch elections, than caring about national welfare. However, the series quickly seems to lose track of this message in its eagerness to come up with a system that only places even more surveilling power in the hands of the state.
Then there’s the question why Farzi had to offer a take on demonetisation at all, if it had nothing valuable to add to the conversation. If the financial and mental toll demonetisation took on millions of us wasn’t something showmakers Raj and DK were convinced merited talking about, they could have just left it out of the story. It instead, laughably, waxes poetic about all the “security” features in the new notes, as if that wasn’t one of the few bleak comedies we had at the time while we lined up outside ATMs at one in the morning. Who can forget that viral video of news anchor Swetha Singh claiming, falsely, that the (speedily retired) 2,000-rupee notes have inbuilt nanochip trackers? One can understand that the showmakers didn’t want to imply that counterfeiting is an easy hack, nor one to be attempted at all. But the sequence verges on absurd fawning.
The series offers a host of characters who keep you immersed. Sunny is at his best in the show when we’re not being almost relentlessly subjected to his tedious mind voice. It does little to help us empathise with him. His daredevilry in starting off his counterfeit currency scam, on the other hand, is entertaining. He takes to it with a certain panache and swagger that makes you root for him.
Shahid owns the role, except when he’s boring us with his inner thoughts. It’s easy to see a young man, disillusioned with the hand dealt to him. There’s a simmering angst to Sunny, which the actor delivers flawlessly. Sunny’s best friend and collaborator in his new criminal venture is an amusing Firoz (Bhuvan Arora), who keeps up a steady stream of irreverent comedy that lightens the mood.
And it is stunning to watch VJS deliver his lines in Hindi and look superbly comfortable doing so. The actor reportedly insisted on doing his own dubbing, apparently following the flak his Telugu debut Uppena received for going with a dubbing artist. VJS’s distinctly recognisable voice is hard to replace, particularly for an actor who is used to doing characters with depth rather than flimsy mass-roles. As Michael Vedanayagam, the actor’s easy witticisms translate effortlessly into Hindi. Michael swings between languid taunts of powerful men and a bullish tendency to pursue his case, regardless of the threats. Heading a special task force, he becomes an interesting foil to Sunny. It’s also a relief to watch a well-written Tamil character in a Hindi production, even though that bar is quite low for Bollywood, particularly considering the depiction of Indian and Eelam Tamils in The Family Man.
Raashi Khanna as Megha, an RBI employee also obsessively intent on ending counterfeiting, is a rare female character written with depth. In addition to her ambitions to stop the racket, Farzi also focuses on the trials of being a single, working-woman in a big city, having to dodge parental shaming for being unmarried, struggling to rent out a flat and just be herself.
The humour and interesting characters save the show, whether it is Michael, Sunny, Firoz, or the corrupt politician Pawan Gahlot (Zakir Hussain). The cat-and-mouse chase is compelling for the most part. Farzi also offers Michael, a Christian character, in the lead and Firoz, a Muslim character, in an important supporting role, without using the stereotypes multiple cinema industries including Bollywood and Kollywood frequently dole out. Bhuvan Arora’s performance is funny, endearing, and done with such nuance that you come away feeling like Firoz could almost be a person you had recently become acquainted with.
But the series’ politics still manages to be all over the place. Michael’s backstory about being an “encounter specialist” and the journalist who exposed him reflects the tendency of Indian cinema to felicitate such measures as heroism. The stark reality of who falls prey to police encounters and the overlap with caste and class locations is something filmmakers seem determined to overlook or dismiss. Ultimately, Farzi’s messaging is warped. That cost of ambition and ‘duty’ is essentially an overreach of power via the many armed apparatuses of the state, and makes a mockery of human rights violations.
The emotional tug-of-war between Sunny and his grandfather drags down the pacing of the show in an unconvincing attempt to add heart to the story. But Farzi hits its dullest point when it insists on sermonising to the audience, again through Sunny’s omnipresent mind voice, about the follies of greed and counterfeiting money. Yes, we know. It’s wrong and illegal. The ethical conundrums of criminal activity is something the story and the characters should convey to us, without the lazy way out of being preached at throughout a slickly made thriller. At least if Sunny’s mind voice didn’t bore us out of our mind, we could have put up with it.
So, I recreate here, minus some colourful language, how I described Sunny’s endless voice over to a friend: it’s the tedious inner working of a man-child’s brain unfortunately convinced of its own blazing intellect. For the rest of us, it sounds like a dramatised reading of an unfiltered, poorly written blog.
Farzi is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
Watch the trailer here:
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.