Shiney Ahuja holds a cigarette in his left hand like it's an old argument he doesn't want to finish, which is roughly how he plays half his scenes in Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro. If I'm honest, the film is too long by twenty minutes, bloated in that specific way nineties Hindi films refused to shake off even when the calendar flipped and everyone started wearing tailored suits from Raymond. Basu wrote the screenplay himself, borrowing structurally from Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, though he lacks Altman's absolute coldness toward his miserable suburbanites. Instead, Basu drops these nine or ten characters into the gleaming, indifferent concrete bowels of Mumbai, a city that looks less like a character here and more like an enormous multi-story parking lot where people happen to fall in love and cheat on their spouses between suburban train shifts. The narrative relies on coincidence so heavy-handed it occasionally feels like a soap opera written by a graduate student who just read too much Milan Kundera in a corner café. Yet the thing hums. It hums because the people inhabiting these cramped flats and sterile corporate offices look like actual tired human beings rather than plastic movie stars dropped in from Bandra.

Kay Kay Menon plays Ranjit, an executive whose hair is always slightly too greasy and whose laughter has that specific sharp bark of a man who knows he is losing arguments at home and at the office both. He treats Konkona Sen Sharma’s Shruti with a casual, grinding cruelty that feels entirely unperformative, the kind of domestic tyranny that doesn't need to raise its voice to ruin an entire evening. Kay Kay is fantastic at playing guys you wouldn't want to share an elevator with, let alone an apartment, and he leans into Ranjit's pathetic insecurity with zero vanity. Opposite him, Sen Sharma brings a twitchy, nervous precision to Shruti, a woman whose biological clock isn't just ticking—it's sounding an air raid siren she's trying desperately to ignore while typing spreadsheets in some glass tower. Their scenes together have an abrasive friction that makes most other romantic plots in mainstream Hindi movies look like greeting cards. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the editing cuts away from their faces just as a micro-expression of pure humiliation is settling into the corners of their mouths, rushing instead to the next plot point or another exterior shot of local trains screeching over rusted tracks.

Then there is Shilpa Shetty, playing Shikha, whose husband neglects her for a younger model while she drifts through art galleries and high-end malls looking like she stepped out of a glossy magazine that got left in the rain. She meets Shiney Ahuja's Akash, a playwright who works in a call center by day to pay for his passion, and their romance unfolds through poetry readings and train station benches under amber streetlights. Ahuja has this brooding, heavy-lidded stare that works wonderfully when he's supposed to be an intense artist, though his dialogue delivery sometimes drops into that monotonous theatrical drone actors use when they think they're being profound. Shilpa matches him with a quiet, bruised dignity that saves their subplot from dissolving entirely into purple prose. They share these long, rambling conversations about compromise and modern loneliness that feel slightly dated now, like something you'd find in a paperback bought at a railway station bookstall in 2004. They have good chemistry, the kind that makes you forgive the fact that they fall in love with the exact narrative velocity of characters in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.

Sharman Joshi and Kangana Ranaut provide the chaotic, hyperventilating counterweight to the middle-aged gloom of the other storylines. Joshi plays Rahul, a call center employee with dreams of making it big in advertising who falls hopelessly for Kangana's Neha, an aspiring actress sleeping her way up the casting couch with a mixture of pragmatic cynicism and sheer panic. Kangana, in her second major film after Gangster, is electric, chewing through her lines with a raw, unpolished fury that makes everyone else onscreen look like they're reading from cue cards. She drops her purse, screams at casting directors, and cries in public bathrooms with a total lack of vanity that recalls Smita Patil in films like Bhumika, though with a distinct twenty-first-century Mumbai desperation. Joshi plays the lovestruck puppy with genuine comic timing, keeping the tone from sinking into complete grey misery whenever the film threatens to swallow itself in urban despair. They're fun to watch even when the screenplay forces them into situations that stretch credibility past the breaking point, like when Rahul somehow gets mixed up in a bizarrely convoluted revenge scheme involving a local gangster played by Irrfan Khan.

Irrfan, of course, steals the entire movie by simply standing in frame and delivering dry, observational asides about the absurdity of middle-class matchmaking. His character, Monty, runs a marriage bureau and spends his evenings drinking single malt and talking to stray dogs, embodying a kind of melancholy wit that feels entirely organic to the actor's unique rhythm. When he courts Konkona Sen Sharma's character with awkward poems and shy glances, the film finds its emotional anchor without ever raising its voice. The soundtrack, composed by Pritam with lyrics by Sayeed Quadri, is omnipresent, leaking out of car stereos and apartment windows with songs like In Dinon and Alvida driving the emotional beats forward with maximum melodic efficiency. Sometimes the musical cues feel heavy, dropping a soaring chorus right when a quiet lingering shot of a rainy windowpane would have done the job better, but the songs themselves are strong enough to carry the weight. Bobby Singh's cinematography drenches the city in sepia tones and wet asphalt sheen, making Mumbai look both glamorous and utterly suffocating in the same breath. It's an aesthetic that would go on to define a whole decade of urban-set dramas across various industries, establishing a visual shorthand for alienation that every young filmmaker with a DSLR tried to copy for the next ten years.

Basu captures the strange rhythms of a metropolis where millions of people live on top of each other while remaining profoundly isolated from their neighbors. The office spaces look sterile, the apartments look cramped, and the local trains provide a relentless metronome for human heartbreak. There's a supporting character, an old man played by Dharmendra, whose silent, decades-long regret anchors the whole sprawling edifice in genuine human loss, contrasting sharply with the younger characters' frantic scrambling for affection. The film avoids easy moralizing about infidelity and divorce, preferring instead to show how everyday compromises slowly erode the people who make them until they hardly recognize their own reflections in the bathroom mirror. It isn't a neat piece of storytelling, and the multiple narrative threads occasionally tangle themselves into knots that require clumsy coincidences to untangle. Still, there is a messy integrity to the way these lives collide and miss each other that lingers long after the credits finish rolling on a note of ambiguous hope.

By the time the various couples either split apart or reluctantly settle into new arrangements, the sheer accumulation of incident starts to feel exhausting, a reminder that Basu occasionally confuses narrative sprawl with emotional depth. A few supporting actors in the corporate office scenes clearly got dubbed by someone entirely different in post-production, their mouths moving out of sync with the audio in a way that pulls you right out of the illusion for a few seconds. These are minor mechanical bruises on a film that is otherwise so confident in its observation of urban habits and casual cruelty. It remains one of the more successful ensemble experiments in modern Hindi cinema because it refuses to judge its characters for wanting something better than what they've been handed by their families, their bosses, or their stagnant marriages. The final scene between Irrfan Khan and Konkona Sen Sharma doesn't resolve the big questions of urban existence, nor does it offer any grand thematic closure about the nature of love in the big city. They simply sit on a bench, share an awkward laugh about the weather, and walk toward the station as the trains rumble in the distance, leaving all the loose ends dangling right where they started.