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Written by Rajesh Anand
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Starring: Kunal Hemu, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neetu Chandra, Sudhir Mishra
Direction: Madhur Bhandarkar
Traffic Signal is all about the happenings at a busy traffic signal of the mega city Mumbai. The movie is a creation of the talented film director Madhur Bhandarkar who has in past made the much acclaimed movies such as Chandani Bar, Page 3 and Corporate. Traffic Signal is the third in his Mumbai trilogy after Page 3 and Corporate which depicted the lives of the wannabes and the glitterarti and the boardrrom manouevers respectively in the modern Mumbai society. Madhur had also made an award winning movie Chandni Bar which dealt with the lives of bar dancers. The director has definitely
carved a niche for himself in making movies which expose the murky underbelly of the metropolis.
The movie caught my attention also due to the fact that it stars Neetu Chandra who is a native of Patna and has earned a good name for herself in the field of modelling and now the Bollywood movies. Earlier she had acted in a multi starrer movie called Garam Masala. Bihar is not quite well known to produce film heroines and emergence of Neetu Chandra as a lead Hindi actress is a very welcome news.
The starting scene of Traffic Signal is impressive, promising the plot to unfold a la Satya, however, the script does not turn out to be exciting enough to deserve even a score of 5 on a scale of 10. As reviewed in the media, the movie has good sub-plots but lacks in an overall story capable of leaving a lastimg impression in the viewer's mind. The movie is made around the character of Silsila (Kunal Hemu), a young boy with a heart of gold. Silsila was literally born on the traffic signal and grew up amidst the beggars, the mafia, the petty vendors, the tricksters, the eunuchs and the people involved in the flesh trade. Silsila is the manager of the gang which collects haftas (weekly extortion money) from the tens of such persons who eke out their livelihood at the traffic signal.
In comes Rani (Neetu Chandra), a migrant from Gujarat, who alongwith her sister would set up her wares to sell dress materials at the signal. She is helped by Silsila and in the process she comes to observe Silsila closely. Mutual admiration follows and the two become great soul-mates.
Parallely, host of other sub-plots keep unfolding. The most prominent is that of Noorie (Konkona Sen Sharma) who as a call girl and also in love with a failed young man Dominic (Ranvir Shorey), essays the finest of all the performances in the movie.
The conning of people by the guy posing himself as a software engineer feigning to have lost his wallet and in need of 100-200 rupees is done very realistically. I have personally been duped by such a person at Chennai railway station. At that instance, this middle-aged decent looking man who spoke in good English about losing all his money etc, had caused me to part with a hard-earned Rs.50, still a good piece of curreny in mid-90s.
Then there is the character who came to Mumbai from Kashmir about 10 years back and had been robbed of everything within minutes after alighting from the train. On that particular day, he had just slept off on the platform and when he got up he found a number of coins around him. Now he specialises in posing as a deaf and dumb beggar. Every morning he arrives on the signal in fairly decent clothes and changes into just a ragged shorts and applies some dirt on his face which makes him elicit a lot of sympathy from the commuters. Later, one such commuter who would routinely doante money to him
recognises him at a posh multiplex when the impostor beggar was buying popcorns for himself and his girlfriend. The commuter confronts him. However, this does not deter the beggar at all. He complains to other people standing nearby about the harrassment by this rich pot-bellied Gujarati businessman commuter. Much to the chagrin of the businessman, the people prefer to believe the beggar and ask the commuter man to shut up.
There is also a Tsunami victim child called Chinnaswami who has lost his parents but falsely believes that they are alive and spends nearly all his savings making long distance calls to the officials in his native place who prefer not to tell him the sad realities.
The movie, however, ends rather abruptly. Silsila becomes an accused in the contract killing of an honest civil engineer who was opposed to the construction of a flyover.The construction of flyover suits the top boss of the mafia Haji Bhai (Sudhir Mishra) but would destroy the traffic signal and thus the large family which Silsila cares so much.
On the whole, Traffic Signal is a watchable movie with a large dose of realism and expose but lacks the magic to qualify as a great movie. As one reviewer put it Traffic Signal is more like a collage of moments than a cohesive script.
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