A new film on Mumbai looks at cliches with a fresh eye, some humour and just a pinch of reality. In director Pankaj Advani's ensemble piece, Sankat City, involving 21 characters or rats, multiple plots breeding ambition and greed unfold only to give the audience immense comic relief
A new film on Mumbai looks at cliches with a fresh eye, some humour and just a pinch of reality. In director Pankaj Advani's ensemble piece, Sankat City, involving 21 characters or "rats", multiple plots breeding ambition and greed unfold only to give the audience immense comic reliefSometimes the challenge is greater when you wish to dabble in subjects that have seen enough creative minds dissect every facet of its existence. But director Pankaj Advani couldn't care less if there were as many as 100 books and 100 films on Mumbai being perpetuated every second. He would still have a story to tell, and he is quite sure he would tell it like nobody else. Advani has lived in Mumbai for the last 15 years, and he is in love with the contradictions the city's heart is full of. With this script, he has found a comical way to bind all its eccentricities. "I am not preaching anything through the story. Though the situations and characters arise from my various experiences, I'm just trying to make a comic-thriller. Or rather, a sugar-coated black comedy," he says.
His carefully written characters, all of 21, have pretty much nothing to do with each other. The USP of the film lies in this magical entwining of people and plots that revolve around the two main characters Guru (Kay Kay Menon) and Mona (Rimi Sen). Faujdar (Anupam Kher), Sulaiman Supari (Rahul Dev), Sikandar Khan (Chunky Pandey) and a host of 10 other conmen, drivers, garage owners, actors, producers, are as crucial to the script.
Shot in just 30 days, crunching in close to 12 hours of shooting every day at 60 various locations, it was a tall order, Advani agrees. "We had budget constraints, but it has worked to our advantage. We invested in a reasonable amount of pre-production planning, which led to smooth filming. To cut costs, we chose to film on 16mm instead of the usual 35mm film, but the coarse texture is adding to the overall look and feel of the story."
Shot in tenements, hutments, kohlis, garbage dumps and other representative locations of what signify as the epitome of city life, the film's beat is racy. "The film is performance-oriented, which is why it was important we had enough footage, rushes before picking the perfect "comical timing" moment. Hence the 16mm film worked."
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The quick buck that all the "rats" (Advani prefers to call his characters rats, because of their stealthy, ambitious nature) are after, which make them take short cuts, eventually land them in a bigger mess, or a greater "sankat". This dizzying spiral of events captured in 110 minutes will have you bobbing in and out of reality, but most importantly, it promises to be a good laugh.
Sankat City releases in theatres on July 10.
