CityLights
Synopsis:
Picture Rajkummar Rao violently throwing up a bottle of cheap country liquor in a Mumbai alleyway while holding a plastic bag full of stolen cash, and honestly, that pretty much sums up the absolute emotional wreckage of CityLights.
So anyway, to understand why this poor guy is literally drowning his sorrows in gutter water, we gotta go back to the start in Rajasthan where Deepak and his wife Rakha, played by the amazing real-life couple Patraleka, were just living a semi-normal life running a small garment shop until debt collectors started making their lives a living nightmare.
Deepak is an ex-army guy or something similar, and he's got this massive pride that refuses to let him stay in a village where everyone knows he's broke, so he packs up his tiny family and boards a train to Mumbai because people always say that city eats you alive or makes you rich, and spoiler alert, it definitely tries to chew them up right away.
The moment they step off the train, they get completely fleeced by a smooth-talking scammer who steals all their luggage while promising them a cheap room, which is just standard initiation protocol for newcomers in these kinds of gritty hindi films that refuse to give the characters even a single five-minute break from suffering.
Deepak ends up wandering the terrifying, neon-drenched streets of maximum city with a sleeping kid in his arms and a shell-shocked wife walking beside him, and they somehow find a tiny, crumbling room with a rusted corrugated iron roof that leaks every time it rains.
Right after that heartbreaking arrival, the movie suddenly decides to throw in a random, sweet little romantic montage where they're eating street food and smiling at each other against all odds, which is a hilarious staple of classic bollywood movies where directors just panic and force the actors to look happy before dragging them back into the abyss.
Deepak lands a job fitting shirts at a fancy high-end boutique run by a super creepy manager who smells like expensive cologne and stares too much, but the pay is garbage and barely covers the rent, so Rakha has to start looking for work too because survival in this town is brutal.
Rakha gets hired at a shady dance bar where men throw currency notes at women swaying under flashing pink and blue lights, and she stands there freezing inside with absolute humiliation written all over her face, but she keeps doing it every single night just so they can buy formula milk and cheap rice.
Deepak finally finds out about the dance bar job because he follows her one evening, and he completely loses his mind outside in the parking lot, screaming and crying because his fragile male ego can't handle his wife earning money this way, which leads right up to the heavy, depressing interval block where you're left staring at the screen wondering how anyone could possibly make things worse for these two.
So then the second half starts and things just plummet straight into total disaster mode, because Deepak's only real friend in the city, this loud and overly cheerful guy named Vishnu who helped them settle down, gets killed in a brutally botched robbery at an ATM or a warehouse, and the death hits Deepak so hard that he starts losing his grip on reality.
Vishnu's body is found on the tracks or in an alley, and Deepak has to identify him, and the pure, agonizing shock on Rajkummar's face during that scene is just phenomenal, completely removing any doubt that modern hindi movies can still punch you straight in the gut without relying on big dance numbers.
Deepak gets fired from the shirt shop after a stupid misunderstanding involving a missing zipper or a customer complaint, and now they are completely out of options with zero rupees left and an eviction notice practically nailed to their rotting wooden door.
Desperate times make good men do terrible things, and Deepak hatches this half-baked scheme to rob his former boss's store using a stolen revolver he bought from a sketchy guy in the slums, sweating through his shirt as he rehearses how to hold the gun without shaking too much.
The robbery goes sideways instantly because Deepak is way too soft-hearted for crime, and the boss catches him, and after a pathetic, clumsy struggle, Deepak accidentally shoots the guy and runs out into the pouring rain with a bag full of stolen cash, which brings us right back to that opening scene in the alley where he's puking his guts out from sheer guilt and panic.
He stumbles back to their pathetic shack, bleeding and weeping, and confesses everything to Rakha, begging her to pack their bags immediately so they can run away back to Rajasthan before the cops kick their door down.
Rakha looks at the blood on his hands, looks at the stolen cash, and makes the heartbreaking decision that they can't live like hunted animals anymore, so she forces him to leave the money behind and promises she'll find a way to meet him at the railway station later that night.
The police raid the house five minutes after Deepak sneaks out into the darkness, but Rakha takes the full blame, screaming at the cops while clutching her little daughter tightly as the sirens wail outside and the neon lights of the city blur into bleeding streaks of red and blue.
Deepak is sitting alone on the dusty platform of the crowded railway station, nervously checking his watch every two seconds, surrounded by thousands of indifferent commuters rushing past him to catch their trains while the loudspeaker announces delayed departures into the humid night air.
He stands up abruptly when he sees a familiar face walking through the crowd, but it is just a random stranger, and he slowly realizes with a sickening drop in his stomach that Rakha is never coming, and that the city has officially swallowed his entire family whole.
The screen cuts to black as Deepak breaks down in silent, ugly tears on the platform floor.
Patralekhaa wears these plastic heels in the second half that squeak against the tile floor of a garment sweatshop, and if I am honest, that audio detail bothered me for twenty minutes before the sheer pressure of the narrative made me forget about it completely. That is usually how Hansal Mehta works, dropping you into the rough acoustics of a concrete stairway or the back of a tempo truck before you have even adjusted your eyes to the grime. CityLights is an official remake of a British film that nobody talks about anymore, but you would never guess that from the way the dialogue feels scavenged from the actual streets of Mumbai. It is a harsh migration story about an ex-serviceman from Rajasthan who packs up his wife and their young daughter, chasing the cold promise of city wages after his small-town life collapses into debt. Hindi movies usually treat poverty as either a noble aesthetic or a musical backdrop for melodrama, yet this film stares directly at the grease under the fingernails and the way desperation smells.
Rajkummar Rao plays Deepak with a kind of cautious posture that tells you he is used to taking orders from men who hate him. He does not play the victim with wide-eyed sincerity; instead, he handles his grief and his dwindling options with the irritable pride of a man who cannot afford to lose his temper. When he secures a dangerous gig transporting stolen military uniforms across town on a rusted scooter at midnight, his face is tight and gray in the streetlights. Hansal Mehta frames these nocturnal runs with a jittery handheld camera that makes every pothole feel like a physical blow. You can feel the moisture in the Mumbai air sticking to their clothes, heavy and greasy and smelling of open drains. The screenplay doesn't rush the descent, letting the characters exhaust their meager savings rupee by rupee over days of unwashed socks and stale bread.
The supporting cast features a few actors who are clearly dubbed by someone in a suburban sound booth three weeks after the shoot wrapped, and that minor distraction pulls you out of the illusion just enough to remember you are watching a dramatic feature. But Patralekhaa holds the center with a quiet, terrified tenacity that prevents the picture from tipping over into misery porn. Her character Rakhi has to leave her baby with a stranger in a cramped tenement while she learns how to stitch shirt collars at lightning speed for pennies. There is a scene where she comes home with bleeding fingertips and simply stares at the wall for a full minute, and the camera refuses to cut away to a comforting embrace or a swelling violin cue. The soundtrack stays mostly out of the way, preferring the ambient screech of local trains and the endless hum of ceiling fans that barely move the stagnant air.
People often bring up Shahid when talking about this specific actor-director pairing, but this performance feels much closer to the anxious, sweaty desperation of John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon than anything from the usual playbook of commercial Indian cinema. Deepak is not a rebel or a martyr. He is just tired. The cinematography by Sean Bobbitt utilizes a washed-out palette that drains the primary colors from the frame until everything looks like old newsprint left out in the rain. When the family finally sleeps, they sleep in a heap on a thin foam mattress that smells of someone else's sweat. There is no poetic voiceover telling us how hard things are for the migrant working class. The film simply watches them calculate the cost of a bus ticket versus a liter of milk, morning after morning, until the math stops making sense.
The third act introduces a level of physical danger that stretches credibility just a fraction too far for a domestic drama, pushing Deepak into a heist scenario that belongs in a totally different picture. Yet Rao keeps his performance anchored in pure terror, reminding you that ordinary people do not become criminals because they are bold, but because they ran out of doors to knock on. By the time the screen cuts to black on an unresolved silence, you are left sitting in the dark wondering why anyone would ever choose to romanticize the neon glow of a big city when it costs this much just to keep the lights on.