Ratings: _****
The people in charge of enforcing the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act 1959 have found an unlikely supporter in Madhur Bhandarkar. His new movie could lead to a drop in business at traffic signals. After this film, beggars and hawkers shouldn’t be surprised if their entreaties are met with cold stares.

The exposé style of filmmaking that Bhandarkar set into motion with Page 3 plays out once more in Traffic Signal. Silsila (the stunning Kunal Khemu) is a “signal manager” who collects a fee from beggars and hawkers to ply their trade at the Kelkar Marg crossing. Initially, Traffic Signal appears to be a movie without a plot, taking lots of time to explain how the signal economy works: it claims that the various people who knock on your vehicle windows are part of an unofficial business with its own balance sheets and network of bosses. The key characters include Manya (Upendra Limaye), a cripple who draws Sai Baba portraits on the streets, Noorie (Konkona Sen Sharma), a streetwalker whose business is cut into by a gay hooker (Bhandarkar’s homophobia rears its ugly head again), Dominic (Ranvir Shorey), a drug addict who’s sweet on Noorie, and Rani (Neetu Chandra), a vendor of embroidery work form whom Silsila falls. Their grubby paradise is threatened when a builder and politician collude to extend a flyover that’s supposed to end before the signal. Silsila’s big boss Bade Khan (Sudhir Mishra, trippy) kills an engineer (Manoj Joshi) who’s resisting the builder and Silsila must choose between his superiors and his comrades.

Bhandarkar may have shot Mumbai’s gritty streets inside a massive set, but Traffic Signal is as real as our city’s slums. The movie merges diverse personalities and storylets to achieve the fluidity of Page 3 and depicts Mumbai low life with as much bleakness as Chandni Bar. The tight narrative belongs equally to all the characters. The movie also benefits vastly from Nitin Desai’s set design and distinctive costumes by Shefali Gupta. Bhandarkar may leave us with a mixed message in the end – sympathise with beggars but know that your charity is probably adding to the profits of criminal gangs – but his eagle eye for detail, realistic characters and urban issues remains top-notch. Nandini Ramnath