CAST: Kay Kay Menon, Rimi Sen, Anupam Kher, Manoj Pahwa, Yashpal Sharma, Chunky Pandey, Sri Vallabh Vyas, Dilip Prabhavalkar, Hemant Pandey, Veerendra Saxena;

DIRECTOR: Pankaj Advani

Sankat City is Mumbai, maximum city filtered and distilled via its minimum people. In one of the sharpest scenes from Pankaj Advani’s zippy, kooky comedy, a tattered king of the landfills points to mountains of rubbish heaps — that one is Goregaon, and that is Versova. And then a tractor runs over a money-filled tote, spilling thousand rupee notes into the noxious air — the smell of money mixes with the smell of garbage. That is Mumbai’s smell, and spirit, and the director nails it.

It’s tempting to compare Advani’s first released film (his brilliant debut feature Urf Professor is still sadly languishing unseen; several of the actors in that one are present here) with Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Kundan Shah’s towering black comedy that redefined the genre: there’s a corrupt builder here too, and all sorts of other dodgy types. Sankat City stands on its own, even if it reminds you of Ek Chalis Ki Last Local and Johnny Gaddar: its characters are people on the margins, all scrambling to survive, and a vein of gleeful amorality runs through it.

Guru (Kay Kay) steals cars. Ganpat (Dilip Prabhavalkar) re-models them. Sharafat (Shri Vallabh Vyas) sells them. Mona (Rimi) is a girl on the make. Sikandar Khan (Chunky) is an actor who says “Inshaallah” (do we know anybody like that?) and looks at himself in the mirror a lot.

... contd.