Shanghai

Genre: Thriller | Year: 2012 | Duration: 105 mins | Director: Dibakar Banerjee | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: Hindi | My rating: 4*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: “Kaul: Ye CM PM  ban sakti thi. Hum Cheen se aage nikal sakte the.”

‘Shanghai’, set in Bharat Nagar, a fictitious town in India, is based on Vassilis Vassilikos’s Greek novel ‘Z’. Dibakar Banerjee has done full justice with the screenplay and direction, and the actors, with their brilliant performances, have portrayed the different moral dilemmas that various characters face in circumstances created, making it an engrossing and thought-provoking film. The movie doesn’t take sides on good or bad, and instead holds a mirror to the contemporary political greed and bureaucratic corruption that riddle India.

A prominent social activist, Dr. Ahemadi (Prosenjeet Chaterjee) is mowed down by a tempo while protesting against the upcoming International Business Park project (IBP), which is the brainchild of the State’s CM ‘Madam ji’ (Supriya Pathak) that plans to demolish Bharat Nagar and make it the next Shanghai. IAS officer Krishnan, who’s the vice chairman of IBP, is put in head an inquiry commission by the CM and her principal secretary, Kaul (Farooq Sheikh). He discovers incontrovertible evidence with the help of Shalini Sahay (Kalki Koechlin), a student and lover of Dr. Ahemadi, and Jogi (Emraan Hashmi), a complex small-time porn film maker, which shows that the politicians were involved in the attack. In this serious movie, Emraan’s character provides the genuine laughs from time to time, and clearly, this is his best performance to date. The climax of the movie is brilliantly done, not so commonly seen in the movies made by Bollywood.

This engaging and fast-paced political thriller with characters in grey is my Movie of the Day.