‘Mitron’ review: One for Gujarati millennials

This coming of age comedy about two opposite personalities is tiresome and repetitive

It takes an ambitious girl to make a lackadaisical Gujarati boy realise that there is more to life than oversleeping and drinking with friends. The man-child, Jay (Jackky Bhagnani), believes there are three kinds of people in this world: employees, entrepreneurs and those who idle away their lives; and he gleefully belongs to the last category. Avni (Kritika Kamra) is driven and has struggled enough by virtue of being a woman. Her father always wanted a boy (“ Bachpan main cycle se gai ko takar mara toh ladki hui (“As a child I hit a cow with my cycle and therefore got a daughter)” and wants to marry her off before she pursues her expensive dream of studying in Australia. Jay and Avni's personalities are contradictory but their unlikely friendship is based on the shared parental pressure of getting married. Despite being the essence of this film, their bonding is neither infectious nor humourous. In fact, their camaraderie and disagreements are the most unappealing aspects of Mitron .

It has a lot to do with Bhagnani, who is consistently bland as a man-child at the centre of this saga, making you wonder if he is actually efficiently pulling off a lacklustre character. Even if you hold strong opinions about immature grown-up men, Bhagnani’s Jay is neither infuriating nor inspiring. The Wake Up Sid -esque flavour of the film hence falls flat amidst a farrago of clichéd twists in this part romcom, part coming of age drama. Kamra, with years of television experience on her résumé, tries her best to be on the opposite end of the Bhagnani spectrum but her character’s one-dimensionality doesn’t provide her much fodder to work with.

With a run time of two hours,

Mitron gets tiresome and repetitive. Based on the 2016 Telugu film,

Pelli Choopulu , there are occasional moments of humour that arise solely out of transporting the setting to Gujarat. The characters organically break into Gujarati and take a dig at themselves, particularly their obsession with marriage, business and money, which feels fresh and authentic. But when it comes to the generation gap and millennial idea of success and ambition, the film trudges down the path of self-righteousness rather than humour, further diluting an already confused script. As for politics – which evidently gave birth to the title of the film – the only funny one-liner on Narendra Modi, as seen in the trailer, becomes ‘neta’ in the film. As contemporary as

Mitron may try to be, some areas will continue to remain off bounds, even in jest.