Take a bow, Shah Rukh Khan, raves Raja Sen.

Who could do this film but Shah Rukh Khan?

Conceptually, the basic idea propelling the narrative of Maneesh Sharma’s Fan appears deceptively simple -- that of an obsessive fan, a bit of a cross between Misery and The King Of Comedy -- and, judged from the surface, this film works like a slickly efficient Darr homage.

Yet, behind the thriller-movie makeup it wears, there is so much more to Fan, a film that should be hailed for its satirical sharpness and for its subtle subversion. And it deserves to be celebrated for the way it allows the world’s biggest movie star to cleverly lampoon his own absurdly, inevitably inflated legend. 

For this is a film where Shah Rukh Khan crowns himself his own greatest admirer. 

Lookalikes don’t often resemble the celebrities they attempt to ape.

Styled to accentuate a passing resemblance, they more often than not look like a wonky wet-watercolour version of the real thing,something sculpted with less finesse and more raggedy edges.

The fleeting moment of doppelgänger magic only takes place if and when they manage to find precisely the right light, the right angle and the right expression -- for that one instant, the star’s the limit. 

Limit isn’t a word too familiar to Gaurav Chanana, a West Delhi cybercafe owner who dreams Mannat-sized dreams.

The young boy bears a squint-your-eyes resemblance to the country’s biggest star, Aryan Khanna, and it is this similarity that fuels his haircut, his body language, his hopes and deepest desires.

The fact that both these characters are played by Shah Rukh Khan is a revolutionary move, immediately setting this film apart from films like The Fan that it may well have been inspired by.

Chanana’s voice is thin, chirpy, eager, but it is when he puts on Aryan’s voice (the first words he mouths in classic SRK fashion are also, tellingly, the title of an underrated Shah Rukh film, Dil Se) that despite his being visibly a low-rent clone, the crowd believes in him. They wilfully hold the scales up to their eyes because they want, for a moment, to buy into even this blurry similarity. 

Gaurav,on his part, believes solely in Aryan.

His obsession with the star might not be purely platonic -- he once shyly expresses a desire to be part of an item song with the superstar, and later refers to him as the love of his life -- though it may have transcended such base desires. All he wants, he claims, is a hug. His earnest but naive methods to acquire said embrace are tremendously misguided, and a disgusted Khanna makes it clear he wants nothing to do with him. Having now found his supervillain origin story, the heartbroken and vengeful Gaurav decides to aggressively go after Aryan with all the rage of a lifelong devotee who has finally discovered his god’s feet of clay. 

Sharma stays warmly and affectionately sympathetic toward the likeable fantill he snaps, after which the film goes darker and yet begins to appear more conventional.

Don’t be taken in -- Fan is never a template film, especially when it begins most to resemble one.

This a film full of long and elaborate chase sequences, but these exist both ironically, in order to skewer the constant implausibility of Bollywood action set pieces, and, more crucially, to blur the line between fan and star: Can anyone do what the man on the big-screen can? Yes, literally anybody can -- and, for the most part, they can do it better. 

Throughout the action there are clues to how blind faith in cinema steers you wrong.

Gaurav, for instance, leaping from parapet to parapet in order to escape cops, begins to line up an impossibly filmi jump onto anair-conditioner grill only to be stopped in mid-air by a suddenly open window while a tubby cop lands on the grill and plunges to peril.