City Lights Hindi Movie Review

This is a slice of life – bitter life cinema. Hanslal Mehta gets it to you with touching sincerity and a tale telling style reminiscent of Govind Nihlani at his very best. This is clearly a wonderful film to showcase the factor that India has great talent – albeit the inspiration from elsewhere. Inspired by Metro Manila it is in a way also contemporary cinema (and society’s) return to Bimal Da’s Do Bigha Zameen. Only that this time the world of crime and intrigue is far more pervasive and bitter. In a way poverty is not new, but juxtapositioned with the contemporary content of societal values, the tragedy is more complex and pronounced.
The two hour narration is not for the emotionally weak or those with a weak conscience. It gnaws and shows you that we need to revisit the premise of our happy and luxurious lives. Even as a nation celebrates the new thumps up at the political level, we may be do well to ask if we are a socially decadent world.
While people in High Places have spoken about bank loans and public money, is the modern commercial Kabuliwalla (to borrow the expression from a judicial pronouncement) the genesis for many a social evil? Here we do not debate with life much less when sliced from art or cinema. Here the streams run their unalloyed ways.
Our story is simple Deepak (Raj Kumar Rao) is a business failure who runs into losses and hounded by the money lenders. He leaves Rajasthan to our own gold-pot Mumbai in search of better days. He is accompanied by wife Rakhi (Patralekha) and their little daughter. Jeremy Poolman: The Road of Bones says: isolation and abandonment have the power when used well in tandem and with gusto to break a man in spirit and heart just as a pistol when fired with skill has the power to penetrate the flesh and break a man’s bones. Hanslal Mehta deals with exactly this. Even as Deepak becomes a spectator of his own life, he gets drown only deeper into the vortex of helplessness. While wife Rakhi gets to a format of Lady Warren’s profession, he finally finds a job with a security agency. Vishnu Sir (Manav Kaul) is his boss and helps him takes the baby steps in his new job and Mumbai. While Vishnu has a hidden plan for his seeming care and concern for Deepak the latter echoes the lines from Paulo Coehlo: In my lust for life, I don’t regret the painful times. I bear my scars as if they were medals. I know that freedom has a high price as high as that of slavery, the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile even when that smile is dimmed by tears,
Surely neither life nor times is out there choosing Deepak as a fav child. The resultant mess he is in tells a life lost in dreams hijacked and he suddenly suffers the plight of a dove in the midst of vultures. The aching question that arises and goes unrequited is as to why is a honest decent happy life now just a mirage? Impaired dreams, derailed desires, captives of irony shadow chasing in a globe of dulled conscience is the gnawing and gut wrenching story told in the backdrop of an apathetic and sometimes actively vindictive society, in the backdrop of the evening of a lit Mumbai: City lights. In case you are the kind who is willing to be disturbed by a theme of this kind then unhesitatingly go for the film. It is another masterpiece. Resultantly tickets are easy to get. No Khanionics, no heroine jatkas, and yet cinema- or exactly for those reasons good cinema. Watch good performances from Manav Kaul and debutant Patralekha. More importantly watch the killer winner performance from Raj Kumar Rao. He is so strewn of mannerisms and star quality, that you heart goes out for the guy. This is acting at its arguable best.
If you have dreams for good cinema, then borrow from the lyrics in the film: Soney do khwaab bune do ; jaagenge phir thamenge; koi wajah jeene ki, Sone do khwaab bune do.

Rating : 4 stars
+ Hanslal Mehta and Raj Kumar Rao
– Too conscience pricking.
L. Ravichander.