Mahesh Manjrekar’s City of Gold takes a neo-realistic look at the downfall of the textile mills and its workers that reigned supreme three decades ago in Lalbaug-Parel (that’s the title of the Marathi version of the film), the heart of Mumbai. But what could have been classic cinema ends up being commercial celluloid. While Manjrekar persuasively highlights the piteous and penniless plight of millworkers, he touches the politics of the plot only peripherally thereby losing on the immense potential of tapping the capitalist corruption that led to the collapse of an entire culture.

The film traditionally opens in a flashback where Baba (Ankush Chaudhary) narrates how his family was struggling for survival in early 80s. His father (Shashank Shende) was a retired millworker awaiting his pension while mother (Seema Biswas) was somehow scrambling to make ends meet. His siblings comprised of a cricket-crazy brother Mohan (Vinit Kumar), sister Manju (Veena Jamkar) working at a beauty parlour and the youngest being the hot-headed Naru (Karan Patel).

When the mill-owner (Sameer Dharmadhikari) decides to shut down the plant to redevelop it as a plush commercial complex, the mill-workers go jobless. Union leader Rane (Sachin Khedekar) teams up the workers to fight against the capitalist but their protests don’t help, only making matters worse for the unemployed labour. With no endurance option left, men turn towards crime, woman resort to prostitution and some families also commit mass suicide. Circumstances get awful leading to systematic extinction of mills and mill workers in Mumbai.

While the concern was widespread across textile industry of the era, the film focuses the issue through a single textile mill and is primarily seen through the eyes of one family. While it externally explains the annihilation of the industry, it doesn’t delve deep into the socio-political nexus and at times also seems one-sided defining a clear antagonist and protagonist. The contribution of a senior union leader is completely cutoff from the script after his introductory provocative speech.

The screenplay by Jayant Pawar and Mahesh Manjrekar is character-driven with the story branching out into several subplots through each character. While each character is unique in its own way and significant to the script, the most impactful subplots are the ones involving Manju’s compromises with life and Naru’s foray into the world of crime. Mahesh Manjrekar’s obsession with the underworld shows off as the narrative gives more importance to the origin of organized crime in Mumbai than the core conflict of mills. In fact Karan Patel’s Naru is essentially a direct spinoff of Sanjay Dutt’s Raghu from Manjrekar’s Vaastav with same conflicts, characterization, mannerisms and glorification. So prominent is his plot in the film that Karan almost qualifies as the male lead from the ensemble cast. Also he has a dedhphootiya kinda impetuous associate (Pakya) plus a stammering sidekick called Speed Breaker (Siddharth Jadhav).

Staying true to the neorealist treatment, the film doesn’t offer any solution to the issue, essentially because there wasn’t any resolution or conclusion to the problem. Unless for the final sequence, which gives the film the shade of regular revenge drama and simultaneously glorifies the underworld. This ludicrous sequence was absolutely avoidable in the otherwise engaging film.