Movie Review: LIFE IN A METRO!!

Numerous characters, their intermingled lives and fast times… that sets the tone of the Anurag Basu movie called “Life in a Metro”. With the pooled talent of a host of actors in this movie that talks about things such as love, commitment, adultery, dreams, hopes, ambitions and a mixture of various emotions, the movie still lacks the luster and the refinement to deal with such issues in a way that can be absolutely gripping and intense.

Shikha (Shilpa Shetty) and Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon) are together in a wedlock which has turned boring and sour as time has silently moved by them. Ranjeet has found solace in the arms of Neha (Kangana Ranaut) who is willing to climb up her professional ladder by granting personal favors to Ranjeet as he is her boss as well. On the other hand Rahul (Sharman Joshi) is another young man who has landed in this metro city of Mumbai with dreamy eyes and silently loves his boss that is Neha.

Shikha, also disillusioned with her marriage meets Akash (Shiney Ahuja) and is attracted to him. Akash is a divorcee and a struggling theatre artist. Their romance takes off even as Shikha is torn between her love for this new man in her life and her fidelity vows towards Ranjeet.

Shikha’s sister and Neha’s roommate is Shruti (Konkona Sen) who works with a radio station in Mumbai. A virgin at 30 and desperate to settle down, she houses a love for one of her RJ’s. Meanwhile she encounters Debu (Irfan Khan) through the internet. Debu is a regular guy with nothing so extraordinary about him and though he loves Shruti, yet she hates him.

Veteran actor Dharmendra makes an appearance as Amol who has returned to India after a long time to spend the last years of his life with the one person he has always been in love with i.e. Vaijanti (Nafisa Ali). Vaijanti is an aunt to Shikha and Shruti and now lives in an old age home.

This is how the plot of the movie is drawn out and the story moves with the despairs bound in the various relationships and the discoveries that the characters make regarding each other. Heartbreaking, crying, remorse and pain... these are the very slots in which the director has tried to pin up his story with no real success.

There is an excessive intertwining of separate stories and somewhere or the other, it seems like they have been only put in the script to heighten the melodrama but really it peeks on to boredom and seems like a complete waste.

Though the movie roped in talents such as Kay Kay Menon, Shiney Ahuja and Konkona Sen who have been well received by the audiences earlier for their intense performances, yet here it only feels as if they have been squandered away. Shilpa Shetty and Kangana Ranaut merely prove to be eye candies. Also the band that keeps making its appearance again and again is annoying and irritating. Everything seems to be too hyped and as if being forced to be dramatic, full of pathos and tear jerking. Even the ending of the movie comes out real clichéd with people running after each other. With so many characters at hand and nothing really substantial to do with them, the director himself seems to have got tired and thus dispose them off in some way or the other.

Except for a few songs such as “In Dinon”, “Baatein Kuch Ankahee” and “Alvida”, there is nothing much praiseworthy to its music album either.

Not a very good show there Mr. Basu…. Better luck next time!!!!