Art & Entertainment

Traffic Signal

It's a crooked life out there but Bhandarkar doesn't tell us anything more than what we already knew.

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Traffic Signal
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After Page 3, Corporate and now Traffic Signal, you feel like telling Bhandarkar enough is enough. His mode of story-telling is getting to be a bit too stale and repetitive to deserve another film of the ilk. The Bhandarkar formula in this trilogy has been simple: pick up a setting, cram it with innumerable characters, throw in a lot of interactions and incessant talk. The broad social picture he paints, however, remains hasty and insubstantial.

This time he picks up a Bombay traffic signal and the begging industry that thrives around it. It is pegged as a ‘180-crore-ka-business’, with agents at various levels managing the flow of money. The look of the film is sufficiently dirty and grimy but it’s a surface realism that doesn’t manage to cut very deep. It’s a crooked life out there but Bhandarkar doesn’t tell us anything more than what we already knew. The builder mafia, the Bangladeshi migrants, the police involvement, the hafta, the drugs and prostitution—several issues are thrown in without exploring them to their logical end.

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Almost all characters remain sketchy, you remember them more for their colourful names—Silsila (he was born the year the Yash Chopra film was released), Tsunami (he lost his family in the disaster), Khadi (he is the social worker). The narrative remains scattered, there are too many parts which never come together. And the plot doesn’t seem to be going anywhere till it all suddenly heats up at the end and then ends just as quickly. An honest engineer who has been resisting building a flyover is done away with by the mafia, the traffic signal has to make way for this flyover and the beggars face extinction. It ends with a question mark.

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The only thing I could empathise with in the film was Bhandarkar’s take on mobile marketing calls, they truly can be very irritating. And what one can’t take any more is his callous treatment of eunuchs and gays. It get worse when someone like Bobby Darling willingly allows himself to become a joke in the director’s hands. Was this the reason why the film begins with the defensive disclaimer that the director didn’t mean to demean anyone? Certainly not in good taste.

High Fivees

Bollywood
1. Salaam-E-Ishq
2. Guru
3. Traffic Signal
4. Dhoom 2
5. Vivah

Hollywood
1. The Messengers
2. Because I Said So
3. Epic Movie
4. Night at the Museum
5. Smokin’ Aces

Rock
1. Pain (Three Days Grace)
2. Ladies and Gentlmen (Saliva)
3. Snow (Hey Oh) (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
4. The Enemy (Godsmack)
5. Anna Molly (Incubus)

Courtesy: Film Information

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