Mapping Maanagaram
Not very often you come across movies like Maanagaram, with multiple protagonists each having a well cut out role in a movie. I was amused looking at the interplay among these protagonists which drove me to do a plot of these characters in the movie.
Statutory warning
This blog contains spoilers even for the director of the movie. So, before continuing to read this, do watch the movie.
The Story
The plot has four main characters who are strangers to each other and the story revolves around the events that put them together by chance. The main story line is about helping total strangers even without knowing their name. So let’s address these characters by their real life names.
- Sundeep — The rugged lover.
- Sri — The worried employee.
- Charlie — The good cab driver.
- Muniskath — The comical gangster.
Data Preparation
So, I did watch this movie again. This time not with popcorn bucket but a pencil and paper in hand to note down few finer details about the movie. This is how gathered data looks like:
I noted down each character’s start and end time corresponding to the runtime of the movie as and when they appeared on the screen.
What I did next was to plot these characters in a time series fashion with each occurrence represented by a circle.
The movie starts with Sri, followed by Sundeep. Then comes in Charlie and finally comes Muniskanth. The gap you see between the first and second appearance of Charlie, Sri and Sundeep is because there is a title song that comes in between and no one makes an appearance in that. The blue vertical line represents intermission. It is astonishing to see an almost symmetric distribution of the characters played Sundeep and Sri. However, Muniskanth goes missing for a while after the intermission.
If you remember we had collected some other data about the appearance of these characters along with the start time. Yes, the end time. The difference of these two will give us the amount of time they spent on screen before they vanish. Let’s use this data to blow the circles based on the amount of time their character lasted for that particular scene.
Astonishing. The plot looks like blisters on a freshly fried papad! The bigger the circle, longer the screen presence. Even though Muniskanth does not appear much compared to other characters, there are two scenes before the intermission which he gets a longer screen presence. All Sri’s circles are somewhat average size. Sundeep owns the biggest circle.
These characters don’t roam in parallel worlds. They roam in the same world, indeed the same city too. Let’s stitch these parallel worlds together as one single world. That should give us an idea about the interplay of characters.
This is how the characters stitched together looks like. The places where they are overlapping refers to the scenes they appear together or they are in the same place. For eg. The Bar scene has a part of Sri’s circle overlapping with a part of Sundeep’s whose circle indeed is overlapped with a part of Charlie’s. One more thing that is striking about this plot is the appearance of completely new colours which were not used to plot as a result of more than one character being in the same scene Eg. Cab Drive = Sri + Charlie, Kidnapping Triangle = Sundeep + Muniskath. There are the lot of other such things which you can find if you look deeper into the plot which will stay here forever.
If you look closely there will be small circles with varying colours around the intermission and mid of first half. That was because the movie was edited in such a fashion to keep the characters switching repeatedly in shorter intervals of time to bring the audience to edge of their seats. Simply masterclass.
What’s Next?
Along with the appearance data, I also collected some other data about the relationships between the characters in the movie. I will try to write a blog around it next time. But if you still haven’t seen the movie yet, please do it before anything else daawww.
