Subhash K Jha revisits Anurag Basu’s 2007 Life In A Metro, which featured an ensemble cast of Dharmendra, Nafisa Ali, Shilpa Shetty, Kay Kay Menon, Shiney Ahuja, Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kangana Ranaut, and Sharman Joshi.
What’s the root cause of Anurag Basu’s obsession with heights? In Murder, Gangster, and now Metro, characters are seen hanging down or just lounging from the ledge of vertiginous boundary-less skyscrapers. In Life In A Metro, he even gets his resident rock band, Pritam & Co, to climb atop a building and strum those guitars. And when it isn’t the music from the strings it’s Irrfan and Konkona playing a mess-matched maritally-challenged couple, getting on a rooftop to scream their lungs out.
It’s meant to be therapeutic. We’ll take Anurag Basu’s word for it. God knows, the man knows what he’s doing. Life In A Metro falters only in parts. Some of the narrative’s punctuation marks are over-emphasized. And the spiral of human relationships often seems to replicate Mike Nichols’ Closer.
And yes, Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy The Apartment serves as a direct reference point for the Kay Kay-Kangana-Sharman Joshi triangle.
But make no mistake, this is a highly original film with a voice that seems to reverberate across a limitless canvas of feelings derived from the juices that flow and irrigate the people in the concrete jungle.
You know you are being sucked into the lives of characters who are largely losers in the garb of white-collar dreamers, looking for love and warmth in a cold, heartless city.
After that dark horse of a film Gangster, chalk up another outright winner for Anurag Basu in Metro. A subtle, sly, sometimes slight, sometimes heavy look-see at a bunch of characters locked in the throes of infidelity.
Rather than go for a fiery flow, Anurag harnesses his narrative into a fiesta of reined-in feelings, all indicating the birth and growth of a damnation in a city that cares a damn about your sensitivities.
Basu has an incredible eye for performances. Every actor is nearly flawless in their appointed place in the chaos of corroded commitments in the city without pity… Always pithy and witty, Metro moves through a laconic labyrinth of laughter and some stifled sobs.
Sanjeev Dutta’s dialogues are so indicative of the character’s inner world that, after a while, you aren’t listening to what the characters are saying. The dialogues slice right into the characters’ hearts and give us an insight into the machinations of a people so busy realizing their dreams, they forget to sleep.
On the negative side, Life In A Metro fails to connect us with the characters beyond their love relationships. If they have a life beyond their heart and below their belts, we don’t see it.
Life In A Metro should be seen as a mellow, melancholic, sly, and sharp look at love and sex in the city. The characters move in and out of some skillfully written scenes. But sometimes you wish they wouldn’t invest their emotions in thankless un-productive spirals of bed and break-heart.
In spite of a frail chemistry with the over- earnest toy-boy Shiney Ahuja, Shilpa Shetty gives a nuanced and ruminative performance. Bobby Singh’s camera captures Shilpa in agonized silhouettes, whispering the ultimate flaws of life. Kay Kay, as her insensitive husband, has a thankless role that he performs with rare understanding.
While Sharman and Konkona (the latter, disappointingly pale in spite of her chic styling) are surprisingly chemistry-less in their screen relationships, Irrfan and Konkona come across the warmest and most cuddlesome couple of this gamboling jigsaw of life and a ‘dearth’. Watch them in the seashore sequence, and savour the rites and wrongs of out their outstanding emotive faculties.
Life In A Metro is manouevered forward by a melee of delicious ideas… like composer Pritam and his rock band appearing as sutradhars to sing their songs. The rain-motif pelts down on the plot, creating pockets of pain, desire, and longing. Umbrellas never seemed to hide so much.
Ear firmly to the ground, Life In A Metro could’ve done with better editing. Akiv Ali cuts the material brutally… but not deep enough.
