Life in a ... Metro (Drama)

Cast: Shiney Ahuja, Shilpa Shetty, Kay Kay Menon, Kangana Ranaut, Konkona Sen, Irrfan Khan, Sharman Joshi, Dharmendra

Direction: Anurag Basu

Showing at theatres near you

Kathmandu:

Boudoir secrets are long out of the closet. From the maharajas and their messy affairs to the modern-day meterosexuals and their multiple relationships, Bollywood has explored it all. What’s more, we’ve even been witness to transgenders and their tantalising twosomes. But the basic tenets of bra-burning brouhaha of the Bollywood cinema have remained the same. Life in a... Metro once more ruminates in retrospect at disintegrating relationships, albeit from a different angle.

Metro probes into the convoluted conscience of those living in the metros, especially those maniacally driven to material success. While moolah mystifies them all, everyone is a mush maniac and almost everyone is in search of a perfect match. While the secretary loves

her married boss, the boss screws her up for a settlement.

But behind the dazzling façade of the myth of love, everyone’s empty and disenchanted.

The string of characters in the flick are all connected together, only to form a confused lot who think sex and talk sex (misconstrued for love). The flick scores on several counts as it explores relationships, mostly tethering in search of a meaning. But as has always been the case with Bollywood flicks, it’s always the whimpering woman who’s left to get the audiences’ sympathy (not fair enough!).

The flick could have fared better by trimming some of the sequences (especially the mawkish mush between Dharmendra and Nafisa) that just seem to stretch endlessly. Also a fair amount of emotional quotient added to the misery of metropolitans would have added an icing on the cake. But the screenplay leaves very little scope for all that to be done when the story gets muddled as a parable play in the second half. Sharman Joshi scores his brownie and proves himself as an actor with métier; others are fair to middling. And as for Kangana, she can do better than typecast herself as a schizophrenic sex siren.