Shor In The City (Hindi)

Once upon a time in Mumbai,there lived a bunch of people,trying to hack a life. How many films can match that most generic of descriptors? Don’t even ask. Shor In The City is one of those films,yes. But it does its picking up of characters and following them around to see what happens on one climactic day,with skill and style.

What makes Shor In The City an instant clutter-breaker is its darkly comic treatment. It makes you smile because its humour comes from within. It’s not grafted. And it’s got heart: we feel for the characters. A trio of no-hopers (Kapoor,Dwivedi,Tripathy) find themselves with a batch of guns. An aspiring cricketer (Kishan) wants money to ease himself into the good books of a selector. His girlfriend (Oak) is sick of being paraded in front of potential grooms. A naïve NRI (Ramamu-rthy) wants to set up a business without taking into account the goons who pay him a call. It’s protection fee or bust,his choice. And then everything comes together on a day when the entire city gets a free pass for maximum noise pollution.

Shor is a very Mumbai film. Its hustlers and crooks and losers try and use situations to their advantage: some get by,some don’t. There’s a bittersweet flavour to this city,which comes through in the film,something that the director duo tried for,and failed,in their previous outing (99) which also combined cricket and crooks. There are some nice touches in this ensemble,especially the thread which shows the growing nearness between a near-illiterate hoodlum and his brand new wife: this is Kapoor in one of his best parts,with Apte shining as his shy bride. The swarthy Ramamurthy has a good fit with the too-straight-for-Mumbai entrepreneur bill. Mistry makes a fine dispenser of gun and goons. But the real find of this film is Tripathy,whose small-time hood is a delight.