Director: Sudhir Mishra; Writer: Sudhir Mishra; Producer: Ravi Malik, N.P. Mukne; Cinematographer: Rajesh Joshi; Editor: Renu Saluja; Cast: Shabana Azmi, Pramod Bala, Madhuri Dixit, Mushtaq Khan, Satish Khopkar, Anjana Mumtaz, Chandu Parkhi, Om Puri, Deepak Qazir, Virendra Saxena, Shakti Singh, Raghuvir Yadav
Duration: 01:51:40; Aspect Ratio: 1.393:1; Hue: 44.899; Saturation: 0.079; Lightness: 0.200; Volume: 0.181; Cuts per Minute: 9.679; Words per Minute: 39.791
Summary: Om Puri plays Rajkaran Yadav, an emigré taxi
driver from U.P. living in Bombay’s notorious
Dharavi slum. His wife Kusum (Azmi), living in
a one-room tenement with his mother, works
to contribute to her husband’s ambitious dream
of owning a factory. However, the business
enterprise is a disaster as the taxi driver gets
embroiled with gangsters, forcing his wife to
return to her first husband. The ending shows
Yadav as boundlessly optimistic as he was at
the outset. The film tries to transform the
conventions of realism usually deployed for
such stories (cf. Chakra, 1980) with surreal
effects including the hero’s oscillations
between fact and fantasy (the latter with Hindi
superstar Madhuri Dixit). The opening
sequence announces the film’s intentions as a
Hindi movie being screened to slumdwellers in
the open air is abruptly ended when the screen
catches fire and the audience riots.
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