Movie: Citylights

Director: Hansal Mehta

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Patralekha, Manav Kaul

Rating: **1/2

Basking in the glory of the recent National award win, filmmaker Hansal Mehta’s “Citylights”, official remake of Filipino film “Metro Manila”, is a movie that’s powered by extremely honest and realistic performances but let down by dull content. For all those who haven’t watched the original, the remake might come across as a heart-rending tale of a family’s struggle to survive in Mumbai. And for those who have watched the original, “Citylights” is a mediocre retelling of a tragic story that gets squandered by the Bhatts brand of high melodrama and extremely jarring and loud music, but for the opening track, which echoes over and over again throughout the film

The story remains the same. A man (Rajkummar) with his family from a small village in Rajasthan lands in Mumbai to work. But Mumbai treats him very badly, and after initial setbacks he finally lands a job in an armoured truck company. There, he meets Manav, who plays his boss-cum-partner, who forces him to get lost in the maze of money.

If Metro Manila was all about subtlety and minimum melodrama, its remake is exactly the opposite. In both the films, the lead characters plagued by poverty are struggling in a crime-riddled city, but that shouldn’t make one story more tragic than the other because they’re remakes. Citylights portrays poverty how Bollywood has been doing it for decades. Bollywood’s version of poverty states that a poor family in Bombay should cry as much as possible because they’re less privileged. Sean Ellis portrays poverty in the original with care and avoids high melodrama. In one of the best scenes from Metro Manila, the wife is weeping thinking about the mess they’re in leaning on her husband’s chest, but she quickly wipes her tears clean and says ‘someday…we will get out of this mess’. Isn’t that reassuring for a film that’s already so tragic? Citylights achieves the exact opposite and makes the story less inspiring.

Mehta makes this weak adaptation barely watchable with his realism, but it’s the Bhatts who make it a rather disappointing film with music and melodrama. The opening song is soothing and registers in mind instantly, but it is played so many times in the film at different instances, you start to hate it to the core. The ear-shattering background score is so loud that sometimes dialogues get extremely hard to follow in the film, which required movingly emotional tune to sync into the mood of the narrative. The film would’ve worked wonderfully even without songs.

Rajkummar stuns everybody with a solid performance as the hapless husband, while newcomer Patralekha, who plays his wife, is a great find and is sure going to leave her mark in the industry inundated with so many actresses. Rao’s transformation from the village-dweller to the gun-trotting security guard in the climax is excellent and will stay with you even after you leave the cinema hall. It’s a rare emotional scene which is actually not so melodramatic in the film. Manav Kaul as the conniving boss steals the limelight right from under Rajkummar’s nose. The sincerity with which the actors play their respective roles is proof to the director’s ability to extract the best out of his actors. If only Hansal didn’t let the Bhatts intervene in his style of filmmaking, Citylights would’ve been a much better film, if not outstanding.

The best part of the film is that the makers gave due credit to the original by mentioning it half a dozen times in the titles. That’s a welcome change in Bollywood.

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