Twitter: filmimpressions
WHAT PRICE DEVELOPMENT?
Central Mumbai today is a hub of high end malls and residential towers. According to the prologue of Mahesh Manjrekar’s film City of Gold (Lalbaug Parel in Marathi), real estate there costs Rs 70,000 per square foot.
However, till 1982, it was the centre of the textile trade, with several mills in the midst of chawls in which families of the workers lived. They had come to the city from outside, yet created in the heart of Mumbai a unique community with its own culture.
The Great Bombay (the city was then not Mumbai) Textile Strike was on 18 January 1982 by the mill workers of under trade union leader Datta Samant. Lakhs of mill workers, hoping for better wages and bonuses, struck work, but the show of strength ended in disaster. Most of the mills were locked out, the people lost their livelihood and over a period of time, the city forgot all about the vibrant community of hard-working people. The nexus between greedy mill owners and politicians as alleged, yet it took many more years for the area to lose its decrepit, defeated look and have a makeover. Today, when wealth can be generated there, who even thinks of the lives that were sacrificed to progress.
Manjrekar, basing his film on Jayant Pawar’s play Adaantar, however, reduces the complex, life and landscape-altering period into a simplistic film about one dysfunctional mill worker’s family and one mill-owning family of evil characters.
The story is narrated by Baba (Ankush Choudhary), a playwright, who feels he doesn’t belong to the noisy, constantly squabbling family, where the father (Shashank Shende) has been laid off work and the mother (Seema Biswas) tries to keep the family together.
The mill owner betrays the union, and the still optimistic workers are devastated. Some commit suicide, some return to their villages; the boys turn to crime and the girls to prostitution. Some of this did happen, but the film unfolds on a single loud, melodramatic pitch that is just never lowered into sensitivity or compassion.
One of Baba’s brothers, Naru (Karan Patel) becomes a gangster, the other Mohan (Vineet Kumar) gets involved in a betting scam, the sister Manju (Veena Jamkar), ditched by her Gujarati boyfriend, married a union leader (Sachin Khedekar) in a bitter arrangement of convenience.
What is really scary is the descent of some of the boys into barbarism, as they loot, extort and kill with glee. Naru’s stuttering buddy Speedbreaker (Siddharth Jadhav) starts his own faction of ragtag followers of gangsters. (Films like Satya and Vaastav have already told this side of the story).
The most caricatured, however, are the mill workers and the politician, because they are easy to turn into heartless devils—people will believe the worst of them.
Amongst the generally noisy performances, Karan Patel’s controlled character of the doomed Naru stands out; also Sachin Khedekar as the crushed union leader. The subplot involving the neighbours (Satish Kaushik-Kashmera Shah) was unnecessary.
City of Gold is an important film, in that it reminds Mumbai of its past; but also a short-sighted one, that makes it characters exist in a void without a before-and-after history. A question that comes up is how a playwright is able to afford a flat in the building coming up where his father’s mill used to be?
The Great Bombay (the city was then not Mumbai) Textile Strike was on 18 January 1982 by the mill workers of under trade union leader Datta Samant. Lakhs of mill workers, hoping for better wages and bonuses, struck work, but the show of strength ended in disaster. Most of the mills were locked out, the people lost their livelihood and over a period of time, the city forgot all about the vibrant community of hard-working people. The nexus between greedy mill owners and politicians as alleged, yet it took many more years for the area to lose its decrepit, defeated look and have a makeover. Today, when wealth can be generated there, who even thinks of the lives that were sacrificed to progress.
Manjrekar, basing his film on Jayant Pawar’s play Adaantar, however, reduces the complex, life and landscape-altering period into a simplistic film about one dysfunctional mill worker’s family and one mill-owning family of evil characters.
The story is narrated by Baba (Ankush Choudhary), a playwright, who feels he doesn’t belong to the noisy, constantly squabbling family, where the father (Shashank Shende) has been laid off work and the mother (Seema Biswas) tries to keep the family together.
The mill owner betrays the union, and the still optimistic workers are devastated. Some commit suicide, some return to their villages; the boys turn to crime and the girls to prostitution. Some of this did happen, but the film unfolds on a single loud, melodramatic pitch that is just never lowered into sensitivity or compassion.
One of Baba’s brothers, Naru (Karan Patel) becomes a gangster, the other Mohan (Vineet Kumar) gets involved in a betting scam, the sister Manju (Veena Jamkar), ditched by her Gujarati boyfriend, married a union leader (Sachin Khedekar) in a bitter arrangement of convenience.
What is really scary is the descent of some of the boys into barbarism, as they loot, extort and kill with glee. Naru’s stuttering buddy Speedbreaker (Siddharth Jadhav) starts his own faction of ragtag followers of gangsters. (Films like Satya and Vaastav have already told this side of the story).
The most caricatured, however, are the mill workers and the politician, because they are easy to turn into heartless devils—people will believe the worst of them.
Amongst the generally noisy performances, Karan Patel’s controlled character of the doomed Naru stands out; also Sachin Khedekar as the crushed union leader. The subplot involving the neighbours (Satish Kaushik-Kashmera Shah) was unnecessary.
City of Gold is an important film, in that it reminds Mumbai of its past; but also a short-sighted one, that makes it characters exist in a void without a before-and-after history. A question that comes up is how a playwright is able to afford a flat in the building coming up where his father’s mill used to be?
Thank you for reviewing !! It is very good post . I always get very good information related to any movie. It is very good site for checking the reviews of any movie. I highly recommend you.
Posted by: download movies for free | 04/27/2010 at 05:59 PM