Subway – Life in a… Subway (2007)

Directed by: Anurag Basu | 125 minutes | romance | Actors: Shiney Ahuja, Sharman Joshi, Irfan Khan, Kay Kay Menon, Manoj Pahwa, Kangana Ranaut, Konkona Sen Sharma, Shilpa Shetty

When hearing the name of Shilpa Shetty, most will think of Big Brother England; and to the “shocking” kiss Richard Gere gave this lady publicly and the wrath of deeply religious India she inflicted upon herself for doing so. You would almost forget that Shilpa Shetty is a well-deserved film actress. In the ‘Philadelphia’ based drama ‘Phir Milenge’ she already gave a beautiful, nuanced acting performance, and her acting in ‘Life… in a Metro’ must show that she can indeed make an impression on the silver screen and not just a interesting news item.

This only partially succeeds. It’s not that she does a bad job as the wife with marital problems, but her confrontations with her husband (Kay Kay) are a bit tearful and her character doesn’t come alive enough. However, the scenes in which she (almost) cheats with Shiney Ahuya are subtly but provocatively portrayed. The subject of infidelity is broached here, and we almost have to deal with ‘Unfaithful’-esque vicissitudes. By Indian standards, the shots in which Ahuya strokes Shetty’s just bare belly must be very daring and it certainly feels that way due to the build-up and tension in the scene. The rest of Shetty’s story, and that of her (potential) lover and husband, is a bit too much melodrama, bombast and quirky twists, so that it doesn’t cause the necessary engagement with the viewer. For example, it is difficult for Shetty to be sad when she has been reprimanded by her husband for having a near affair with someone else for several weeks, while he has had a sexual relationship with his secretary for two years already. Or to feel sympathy for him when he returns home with tears in his eyes, not because he feels morally obliged to do so, but because he has been left no other choice.

The most memorable female actress is probably not Shetty, but Konkona Sen Sharma, who plays the twenty-nine-year-old virgin Shruti, who is now feeling the pressure to get married. Her story is one of the ugly duckling who gets a makeover and then turns into a beautiful woman (but this was already obvious). And about finding love where you least expect it. Her story and acting manage to find a nice balance between light-hearted and dramatic, and her interaction with the versatile Irfan Khan (also very good in Mira Nair’s immigrant drama ‘The Namesake’) is infectious. It’s the only part of the film that feels really effortless and irresistible.

For the rest, the film simply takes on too much, so that various stories only come out to a limited extent. Director Anurag Basu is very ambitious in his balancing act with all the stories about friendship, love, lust, and infidelity, but with this he actually has too much material for a film of more than two hours. In addition to the issues with Shetty and the fun story of Konkona Sen Sharma, the film features old lovers (one of them the mother of Shetty’s character), who see each other again after many years and finally follow their love for each other; but also the need to accept homosexuality is briefly mentioned, as well as the price of too much ambition and too little backbone in the story, copied directly from Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ about the fast business boy, Rahul, who wants to move up in the company. work by lending colleagues (and his boss) his apartment for their late-night escapades. Of course, this story pales in comparison to Wilder’s classic. Sharman Joshi has no charisma at all like Rahul and it also becomes a lot less clear how much he has to crawl through the dust by giving up his apartment, and how underhanded the favoritism in office life is. Also, the character Neha, the groping mistress of scum-marcher Kay Kay (Rahul’s boss and Shetty’s husband), is less effective in imagining her pain and her bond with Rahul than Shirley MacLaine in ‘The Apartment’. Yet she still brings out her suffering, which has probably not been treated in this way in Bollywood films before, in a fairly compelling way. Better, anyway, than the boring Joshi.

Pritam’s music is given an amusing, but peculiar, interpretation in the film. Just like in ‘There’s Something About Mary’, a band playing live occasionally appears – on an apartment building, next to a tree, or in the sidecar of a motorcycle – that provides musical commentary on the story in question. It does distract from the drama, but still feels funny (and not annoying) because of the way the film is interrupted and the video clip-like style of the band’s imagination. ‘Life… in a Metro’ certainly contains interesting elements and a lot of potential, but misses its target due to the multitude of storylines, which in this one, relatively short, film have not all received enough attention to make the film a success. The film could have been a rich exposé about emotional and provocative subjects, but in the end it turned out to be a case of just not.