Faster Fene – A racy thriller


Rarely do you come across thrillers that have you hooked from the first scene to the last. The potential that the genre offers is often underutilised and many times compromised, with add-ons like songs killing the joy of unravelling a mystery (You’d relate to this if you’ve had the misfortune of watching Jagga Jasoos earlier this year). Thankfully, Faster Fene avoids all this and ends up becoming a racy adventure thriller.

Banesh Fene travels to Pune to appear for a medical entrance examination and lives with an aged writer-uncle (Dilip Prabhavalkar) there. At the exam centre, he briefly encounters another aspiring doctor and gets chatting with him. When he reads in the newspapers the following day that the boy has committed suicide, he finds it hard to believe that a certain topper would end his life abruptly. The inquisitive Fene then sets out on a mission to unearth the truth with the help of a sidekick, a lady journalist, an autorickshaw driver and guidance from his uncle.

The story moves around at a fast pace as the slim and harmless Fene discovers several irregularities in the education sector and admission process during the course of his ‘investigation’. He lands in trouble along with others around him when the villain, beautifully played by Girish Kulkarni, goes after him. But Fene is sharp enough to find a way out, every time. And that can be a sore point in a film about a young, unarmed ‘detective’ with a nose for getting to the bottom of everything almost single-handedly. It’s almost impossible to imagine that Fene manages to hold his own and emerge unscathed when the high and powerful are involved in a mighty scam and pulling out all the stops to eliminate him from pursuing the matter.

However, even when you take into account such liberties, Faster Fene manages to hold your attention throughout its duration of two hours. The credit for that goes to the witty dialogues, the entertainment quotient by way of circumstances – especially in the first half – and an edge-of-the-seat-kind-of cat-and-mouse chase. The absence of songs (even during the end credits) that would have rendered a tight plot meaningless comes as a huge relief. The content is king and that is backed by powerful performances with Kulkarni emerging as the best of the lot with his pauses, expressions, one-liners and amusing laughter. Director Aditya Sarpotdar narrates a riveting story with proficiency.   

Faster Fene lives up to the promise that Marathi cinema has shown over the past few years. It’s a film that relies solely on its story and treatment rather than stars or gimmicks. If one were to find other flaws in the film using a microscope, those would be a slightly lengthier second half that could have been cut short with tight editing, and the fact that Fene’s widowed mother is nowhere in the picture even as his life is under threat. But that’s about it. Faster Fene is a fantastic film that proves that if the mind and money are at the right place, the audience can be treated to wonderful cinema in any language.  

- Kunal Purandare 

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