The metro city symbolizes economic prosperity and opportunities, but for those who are new to its ways, it can be a cold and lonely landscape to navigate. This was the premise of Lokesh Kanagaraj’s first Tamil feature film, Maanagaram (2017), that translates to ‘metropolis’. The story, about strangers whose lives intersect and collide, was set in Chennai, but it could have unfolded in any other metro too. Perhaps this was the incentive to remake the film in Hindi. After all, Maanagaram, made on a budget of less than Rs 5 crore, earned over Rs 100 crore at the box-office, and was hailed as a game-changer in the Tamil industry.
Six years later comes Mumbaikar, directed by Santosh Sivan. The film also marks Vijay Sethupathi’s Hindi film debut, after he was seen in the Hindi web series Farzi earlier this year. Two young men (Vikrant Massey and Hridhu Haroon) and a middle-aged cab driver (Sanjay Mishra) are the protagonists of Mumbaikar, and as in the original, none of them is named. They are strangers to each other and to the audience that’s consuming their stories. The anonymity is also indicative of how a big city functions – it is a beast that chews and swallows individuals and erases their identity.
Massey’s character is obsessed with Ishita, an HR manager (Tanya Maniktala) who swats away his attention; Haroon’s character has just come to the city and wants a job at Ishita’s company; Mishra’s character is driving a cab for PKP (Ranvir Shorey), a notorious don in Mumbai; and Vijay Sethupathi’s Mannu is a wannabe gangster from Tirunelveli who frequently messes up his assignments. But unlike Maanagaram where the outsider gaze on the city felt real and palpable, the image of Mumbai as a hostile and alien city is less convincing in Mumbaikar.
For one, Chennai and Mumbai might both be metros, but they’re very different in character. However, Mumbaikar uses the same scenes as Maanagaram to establish the dissonance that a person unused to the city might experience. The film doesn’t embrace the city’s personality and its uniqueness to make the story its own. For instance, it borrows the scene where the small-town boy (Haroon) is taken aback by the common use of cuss words in the big city, but you also have a Mannu from Tirunelveli navigating Mumbai in fluent Hindi. Close-up shots of vada pav don’t mean Chennai has been successfully replaced by Mumbai. For a film titled Mumbaikar, there’s precious little to define the identity of a Mumbaikar.
The bumbling, eccentric Mannu is a role tailormade for Vijay Sethupathi, and he revels in it. The actor, though, is turning into a type rather than a character on screen. His comic timing and dialogue delivery ensure that he’s always entertaining, but there is a sense of fatigue in how he goes about doing it. With every film, he’s transforming less and less into the character and staying more and more close to Vijay Sethupathi.
The romance between Ishita and Massey’s character hasn’t aged well, and the latter seems far creepier in the remake than the original. In 2023, we can all agree that stalking isn’t cute, and that dating a man who goes around pouring acid into people’s chaddis is probably not the wisest thing to do. Sivan, however, runs with the same flaws that Maanagaram had, and this proves to be disappointing.
Mumbaikar has decent performances from Sanjay Mishra, Sachin Khedekar and Ranvir Shorey. The hyperlink plot, though, doesn’t quite come together as it did in Maanagaram where you had the pleasure of connecting all the dots. It felt new and exciting at the time, but now, you find yourself wondering how the same set of people keep running into each other in a huge and heavily populated city like Mumbai. What are the odds?
The season for faithful remakes, especially of films that are available online, is over. There is no fun in watching a remake if the only difference is the setting and the cast. There has to be something more to the film – a different perspective or shift in the plot – that makes one want to watch it. Maybe Sivan thought Vijay Sethupathi would be that difference (Munishkanth, who played the role in the original, isn’t a star), but a trump card works only if there is an element of surprise. Mumbaikar, unfortunately, is vada pav that’s been sitting on the shelf for far too long for it to have any bite left.
Mumbaikar is now streaming on Jio Cinema.
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