The vaastav of the ‘death’ of the textile mill workers of Mumbai three decades ago becomes an excuse for Mahesh Manjrekar to revisit his decade-old underworld crime drama Vaastav.

Taking off from the popular Marathi play Aadhantar, City of Gold (Lalbaugh-Parel) takes that discomfortingly close look at the life and times of textile mill workers plunged into extreme poverty and ignominy by mill owners desperate to ride a giant cash wave.

But it is Manjrekar’s obsession with the underworld that takes up most of the screen time pushing the plight of the mill workers and the politics surrounding them into the background.

The film does work at some levels. The script written by Mahesh along with Jayant Pawar reflects the life and the language perfectly. Characterisations and performances are commendable. There are powerful actors like Satish Kaushik, Seema Biswas, Sachin Khedekar while the rest of the relatively unknown cast is equally competent, often bordering on the brilliant.

The depiction of the chawl dwellers, the bloody action sequences, the background score and cinematography work too. But unfortunately the film fails to move off the beaten path that was every watchable film’s focus during the 80s.

A retired mill worker (Shashank Shende) awaits his pension while wife (Seema Biswas) struggles to make ends meet. Their three sons — one cricket-crazy (Vinit Kumar) who lands up in jail for stealing money for betting; a struggling playwright, also the narrator of the film (Ankush Chaudhary) who sells off his kidney to save the brother; a third (Karan Patel) who gets caught in the net of crime. They have a sister (Veena Jamkar) who falls prey to a rich boy’s lure of marriage and goes through the grind of pregnancy, forced abortion and marriage.

What doesn’t work is the film getting into Mahesh’s comfort zone — the ways of the underworld. It revisits, glorifies and glamourises crime as in Vaastav, almost making Karan the hero of the film. Karan does a good job as Naru but follows Raghunath Namdev Shivalkar (Sanjay Dutt in Vaastav) very closely. There is even one scene where he gives his gun to his mother asking her to kill him. Deja vu.

But too much of violence and less of the politics of capitalism and the greed and corruption that spelt doom for an unfortunate community, kills the spirit of the film. City of Gold needed to be much shorter in length and far less hungover on Vaastav to be an effective treatise of the times.