By Deepika S
Warning: Spoilers!
With the release of Mungaru Male 2 this month, Kannada actor Ganesh faced what one newspaper called an “epic trial”. With the enormous weight of expectations upon him and an impending Karnataka-wide bandh over Kaveri water distribution with Tamil Nadu, could his new film top the original Mungaru Male, the runaway success with a rabbit named Devdas that launched his career a decade ago and changed Kannada cinema forever?
When the Karnataka bandh was scheduled for 9th September last week — the sequel’s original release date — the makers took no chances and delayed the release by a day. After all, when Mungare Male (which translates to Pre-Monsoon Rain) released in 2006, it ran for 865 days, was the first Indian film to be screened in multiplexes for a continuous year, and raked in the highest-ever box office collection for a Kannada film (Rs 75 crore), with releases in 10 countries. Although its plot was simple (boy meets girl, boy discovers she is marrying another man in a few days, boy acquires adorable white rabbit, boy sacrifices his love for girl’s happiness and leaves without her, rabbit dies of grief), the film co-written and directed by Yograj Bhat drew in weepy audiences for its indulgent view of love and heartbreak amidst breathtaking rain-drenched landscapes across Karnataka.
“Normally, a sequel is about taking a story or character forward and I had to steer clear of that and follow a new formula for the film, while keeping the spirit of the original alive,” says Shashank, the sequel’s director, in an interview. “The soul of Mungaru Male was emotion; it is the same with Mungaru Male 2.” MM2 is meant to be updated for the times, so although the lead characters have the same names, they aren’t the same people. Preetham, Ganesh’s character, the simple guy from Bangalore who falls into a manhole outside Eva Mall in the original, is now a rich playboy who seduces ladies across the world but tires of them soon and dumps them when he begins to find them “boring”. Nandini, originally played by Pooja Gandhi and replaced in the sequel by 20-year-old actor Neha Shetty, is a Kodava girl from Madikeri who loves a good challenge — the manic pixie dream girl type that Preetham never finds boring. They holiday in Rajasthan together and have a rollicking time until Nandini disappears from their tent in the middle of the desert one night and Preetham realises three months later that he loves her, and goes off to find her.
Director Shashank talks about wanting to make a film that was “fresh on all levels”. But MM2 throws up several moments of déjà vu, not because of its references to the 2006 film, like the sneaky mention of a rabbit named Devdas or the train conductor with a squint (who exists in both movies only to be made fun of), but because it feels like a rehash of other recent Kannada films. MM2’s opening scene in Slovakia and touting of brands and luxury items reminds me of the opening of the 2015 Sudeep-starrer Ranna (on a super-meta level, Ranna also references a scene from MM in a song, which MM2 references in turn), while the trip to Rajasthan for colour and excitement seems borrowed from Shivrajkumar-starrer Vajrakaya. And when MM2 resumes after the interval to show us Nandini, who goes from the badass bike-riding girl who saved Preetham from his solipsism to the sanskaari girl who needs saving from goons planning sexual assault, that transition feels like reliving not just MM, but the majority of movies I’ve ever watched with a “strong” female character. Sadly, the clothes in MM2 are more stylish, but also generic and less likely to inspire fashion in the way I know MM did: the week after I watched Ganesh in a song sequence wearing a tank top for men, I saw the same top on a male mannequin outside a Commercial Street shop in Bangalore.
Both films are interesting reflections of the aspirations of their time. In the first film, having a mall in Bangalore was a big enough deal enough that it could serve as the location for a hit film’s iconic opening, and a trip to Madikeri or Jog Falls exotic enough for a middle-class audience. MM2 opens in Slovenia, and frequently flashes back to snowy unnamed foreign locations. The film’s flashy clothes and its Jaguars and Audis and BMWs mirror a city that now has Porsche and Maserati showrooms, and luxury malls like UB City selling brands like Armani and Burberry. If the 2006 real-life incident in which Nikhil Gowda (son of former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy and grandson of former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, entitled, 19, Hummer-driving) smashed up a Bangalore hotel after he was denied service at 3.30 am seemed one-off at the time, MM2 is one of an increasing tribe of films (like Ranna) that glorifies that kind of privileged, entitled man-child. It seems positively poetic that Nikhil Gowda is now starring in a film called Jaguar being shot this year in locations including Iceland and Bulgaria on a Rs 60-crore budget, making it the most expensive Kannada film ever made. One key difference between MM and its sequel is that in the latter, the hero is no longer willingly self-sacrificing or noble. Cool dude Preetham rails at his father in his leather jacket when asked to forget Nandini and move on, shouting, “I don’t care about all this sacrifice bullshit and all.”
But director Shashank is right on one count: the “emotion”, the film’s soul, remains. If MM had the Bangalore boy wooing the Madikeri girl and realising their love was doomed, showing him drunk and crying in the rain on the banks of a swollen river talking of the giant wound in his heart, MM2 has Preetham drunk again, this time in a Rajasthani desert, telling Nandini that her eyes are like a painting on the walls of his heart. When I watched the first film a decade ago as a college student, I giggled all through it, believing love and romance were for losers. If I giggled and rolled my eyes this time, it was more for MM2’s sexism and ridiculous consumerism and less for its slow-mo wallowing in love and heartbreak.
Despite MM2’s delayed release, it made over Rs 10 crore in the first two days before violence hit Bangalore and the city shut again, and Rs 15 crore overall in its first week. Not the stunning achievement it would have been in the days pre-2006, but respectable, given the police curfews and imposition of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code against assembly in the week of its opening. Will its soppy dwelling on love and periodic foreign escapes pull in audiences sick of the fighting over the Kaveri and looking for an antidote? If only the movie’s tragic torrential rain could put out this fire.