Towards the end of the movie as the credits roll, Mahesh Manjrekar starts rapping to the lyrics of the title song.
City of Gold
A; drama
Dir: Mahesh V Manjrekar
Cast: Vineet Kumar, Satish Kaushik, Sameer Dharmadhikari, Kashmera Shah, Seema Biswas, Sachin Khedekaru00a0
Rating:u00a0**
What's it about: Towards the end of the movie as the credits roll, Mahesh Manjrekar starts rapping to the lyrics of the title song. After the song ends, he asks the audiences "Aap abhi bhi Mumbai mein rehte ho?" Well the audience might be living in the city, but Manjrekar seems to have gone elsewhere to research his story on the life of mill workers in the '80s. Because the Dhuri family depicted in City of Gold is shown to go through the most tragic situations ufffd unfortunately, those situations have nothing to do with mills shutting down. In an attempt to show their sorry state, he makes the characters suffer incessantly without anything to substantiate the condition. While the setting is a chawl in Parel, the characters making it their home seem from elsewhere.
What's hot: Karan Patel's act as Naru stands out from the rest. Totally comfortable in his skin as the local goonda who's a marionette in the hands of a bigger fish, Patel gives a natural performance. Manjrekar takes effort to recreate the '80s with everything from sideburns to old transistors used to show the period. The action scenes are choreographed keeping in mind the setting. The stylish punches and kicks make way for some hand-to-hand combat scenes.
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What's not: The problem starts early on in the film. After setting up the stage with an epic backdrop, Manjrekar's characters soon start losing their sheen. Be it the matriarch of the family or the playwright son who happily sells one kidney to bail his younger brother, everything seems like a forced effort to play to the galleries. While the story keeps swinging like a badly oiled pendulum from the mills to the chawl, its flow is erratic and uneven. Halfway through, the director loses focus from the subject and starts playing up the characters like leads of a daily soap. Also scenes showing kids drinking beer and showing them biting the flesh off passers-by (to depict their state of poverty) is repulsive. Unlike Vaastav, where violence was cathartic for the protagonist, here it's plain gimmicky. Kashmera Shah's act as the cleavage-baring maami who craves to have a son from someone else than her unappealing husband (Kaushik) stands out like a sore thumb in an already weak story.
What to do: City of Gold tries very hard to be a realistic hard-hitting take on the Mumbai mill workers, sadly it only works in parts.
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