Yuva feels more complex than others of Ratnam's works: he has dispensed with more or less straightforward story of conflicted love (Mouna Ragam) and with the archetypal (Roja) and the formulaic (Bombay), and instead spins three very original narratives into one, each with shorter scenes and rapid cuts, with dialogue and action replacing the usual, very full menu of songs. The grittier setting, in Kolkata, matches this distancing from the abstract and the mythic in favour of the concrete.

Ratnam's preoccupation with the effects of social stratification is again evident: the alternative that Michael rejects in order to stand for political office in India is a scholarship to study in the United States with professor so-and-so, who is "a Nobel laureate" — again these are the boundaries self-imposed by lingering colonial values. I found Michael's conversation with the corrupt minister Prasanjit Bhattacharya very English, in that both parties (and the audience) understood what was being said even though none of it was mentioned in the words that were spoken.

The attitude — even stated explcitly! — is "We are educated; why should we fight with these people" (the corrupt and ignorant goons who run politics) — especially when we can run away to the UK or to America as Arjun is about to do? (Or simply talk ineffectually about it in adda as so much of Kolkata does.) Michael voices it: "Let us go write software, join multinational companies, sell coke and soaps. Earn money for America. Our country can go to the dogs." I have noticed this quality of many Indian emigres: they disproportionately enter finance, or software and other applied and lucrative and scripted aspects of engineering rather than the purer, creative forms of science and engineering. Even when they've made it to the top, it seems, many Indians can't stop behaving in terms of the scripts that the British class system has prepared for them. It's as though the postcolonial angry ghost of the British Empire has arisen, to spirit away the cream of the younger generation and turn them into conformist bankers in bowler hats. We see this bias even in Arjun's father, who had wanted him to stay and to join the civil service; faced with the prospect of Arjun's entering politics, all of a sudden his father wants nothing more than that Arjun should follow through with his plan to flee to the United States.

Ironically, given the film's negative image of America's role in the brain drain, Ratnam in this film seems to have climbed onto the American-led 1990s fad of slow-motion fight scenes, and the song Dol Dol is straight out of the 1990s American hip-hop universe: We don't want your economy, but we'll take all that we can get of your Hollywood?

A further theme in this film as in Ratnam's previous ones is the intrusion of struggles founded on abstract divisions into the concrete lives of individual persons: it's the individuals, Meera and Arjun, Michael and Radhika, Sashi and Lallan, who love each other, but expectations founded on larger social structures (Meera's arranged marriage to a suitor from Kanpur, Michael's role as the opposition candidate which gets him targeted for assassination, and Lallan's assignment as the assassin driven by Prasanjit Bhattacharya's corrupt political machine) keep getting in the way and sabotaging love with death.

The frustration with abstraction is visible even in the more minor plot details: when Arjun and Meera first bring Michael to hospital, Meera is told to fill a form: "Without case registration, we can't operate on him." The same scene occurs in Mouna Ragam, when Divya brings her husband Chandrakumar to hospital after he's been stabbed by thugs. (Kolkata is especially prone to this bureaucratic proceduralism, as was so well evidenced during the AMRI fire when patients were not allowed to leave and would-be rescuers were not allowed to enter.)

As he did in Bombay, Ratnam uses handheld shots to great effect — again, in this case, in the corridors of a hospital.

The film brings out the best and the worst in its characters. The best is Arjun: about to forsake India for the United States, he can't be convinced by his father but is nevertheless drawn in by circumstance, by the random conjunction on the Howrah Bridge, and in the heat of the moment he does the moral thing by saving Michael. The worst is Lallan: we keep hoping that Lallan might be redeemable, as he does at times show genuine tenderness toward his wife Sashi, and his plaintive "Can I become a good man?" in response to news of Sashi's abortion sounds as though it might be a turning point — all that he has to do to find redemption is to get on that train with Sashi and to leave the city forever — but instead he murders his own brother Gopal and returns to his thuggery, and eventually to prison with the possibility of execution.

The film is dominated by men — significantly, all the major political candidates are men; the only female candidate is the one from the village near the beginning of Michael's story. As in Roja (and very unlike Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress!) the women are the sensible ones, but unlike Roja, these women don't always win in the end: the saddest ending is that of Sashi, who returns alone to her village cursing all men as "dogs." This is amongst the darkest of Ratnam's films: although things work out for a lot of the characters - including two of the couples - Lallan pushes away his last chance for redemption and Sashi is left broken and angry.