Very ambitiously this movie tries to deal with more plots than are usually expected in a single movie. I am sure Madhur had his hands more than full with all that he wanted to communicate through this movie. Even though the actors have done a decent job, and some pretty insightful sub plots emerge during the course of the movie, in the end it leaves one with a feeling of things having been dealt with incompletely. The movie is in fact more like a series of sketches, each dealing with a different sub-plot or idea. This feeling is enforced by the fact that it's scenes do not fit together as a tight, cohesive production. This is because even though they involve the same characters, each of them tells a very different story.
Traffic Signal seems to be the perfect example where a director should have gone for an extensive treatment of all these ideas through a serialized production rather than trying to put everything into one grand movie where the limitation of time is a huge constraint. Give me this movie's reel and a pair of scissors and I'll neatly cut out about 10 different episodes that could be independently developed to create a wonderful hard-hitting docu-drama series. With how much the movie attempts to cover of the Indian society and really, also the human condition at a deeper level, I really believe it would have been served better if executed in the way of Kieslowski's work on Dekalog.
6 out of 10.
