Movie Review: Grand Masti

Starring: Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Riteish Deshmukh, plus 6 starlets who are game Directed by Indra Kumar Rating: No rating Is that Farhan Akhtar’s Lucky 3 from Dil Chahta Hai standing under Indra Kumar’s lucky tree from Dil? We can re-christen Grand Masti as Dildo Chahta Hai. And if that sounds crude then wait till you see and hear what Indra Kumar’s new cocksure comedy has in store for you. There is no pulling back from the black hole of luridness this time. The horny trio of boys from Indra Kumar’s Masti is all ‘groin’ up now. They still continue to be obsessed with one part of their anatomy and two parts of the other gender. I remember many of Indra Kumar’s film featured a particular tree which the director considers lucky. There is a tree here in Grand Masti too, where a rigid college principal hangs any student who looks with lascivious intent at the girls on the campus. A spot of Agneepath in a film where life, strictly below the waist is not just hard. It’s hard-to-get. The three leering...sorry leading men who, ummmm, come together represent the spirit of defiant devil-may-care let’s-just-stand-erect-and-stare skirt-chasing that seems at odds with the current save-women-from-rape mood of the country. If you feel movies that objectify women must be discouraged then you are advised to stay as far away from this horny farce as possible. Lekin horny ko kaun taal sakta hai? There are the comedies. Then there are the SEX comedies. Filled with innuendos, suggestive leery double-meaning dialogues that make us chuckle and giggle even if we are not the sort who like to exchange dirty jokes in the sms, Grand Masti has itself a ball at the expense of basic good taste. The gags in Grand Masti unabashedly celebrate the puerile spirit of sms forwards. You know those jokes about women’s breasts and men in a perpetual state of arousal that are exchanged among 12-year old boys who have just discovered the birds and the bees? If you packaged those pssst-pssst jokes from your puberty in plenty of loud aggressive dialogues loaded with double meanings and oodles of close-ups of breasts of all shapes and sizes you’d get into the spirit of Grand Masti. To their credit the three, er, boys Aftab Shivdasani, Vivek Oberoi and Riteish Deshmukh—now in their mid-30s—get into the spirit of the sex-comedy full-on. Oh, they love talking dirty! The one thing that works fully in this film’s favour is it unabashed homage to horniness. Our three heroes are perpetually aroused. To prove it they emanate moans groans and sighs constantly. They smack their lips and roll their eyes as though to remind us that some things in life, like skirt-chasing in films about men on the prowl, never change, even if you have a wife at home that you can’t change. Director Indra Kumar has never been a slave to subtlety. Here he pulls out all stops. He also pulls out other unmentionable objects that are defiantly pointed into our faces. Phallic objects abound. They come in all shapes and sizes. Take it or leave it. For the climactic eruption the director has all the male protagonists hanging by a ledge where the women must strip to create a rescue rope. One really can’t complain about the film’s remarkably steep level of innuendos. Not a single member of the audience for Grand Masti expects anything but coarse humour borrowed from low-brow Gujarati plays. Writer Milap Milan Jhaveri’s wickedly wanton word-play leaves no space for subtlety in the script. There is repeated ‘humour’ about a woman with over-sized breasts repeatedly offering the guys a “free darshan” of her “dono doodh ki factory.” Stand-up comedian Suresh Menon shows up as a mock-villain wearing a golden underwear whose roominess keep inflating and deflating according to the mood. Early on in this pubescent homage to hard-ons Menon gets the privilege of walking up to a woman and sheathing her umbrella with a condom. The obscenity flows out unstopped, unchecked, and uncaring of rudimentary rules of decency. Having declared this to be irreverent territory director Indra Kumar doesn’t really care how lowbrow the humour gets. And the jokes happily really plumb to unimaginable depths. In one sequence the writing crackles and hisses with pleasure as Shivadsani gets his private parts bitten by a cat called, hold your breath, Pussy. What can be said about the writing when the three ladies whom the married heroes make out with are named Rose, Mary and Marlow, only so that their names can together sound like “roz-meri-mar-lo” meaning, very crudely, bang me every day? Ha ha ha, to that. If mammary...sorry, memory serves me correctly the same ‘Rose-Mary’ joke was used in that other recent tribute to lewdness Kya Super-Cool Hain Hum. I guess the smut society is smitten by the same sms jokes. More than the boys I salute the three pairs of ladies playing the trio of gharwallis and baaharwallis for surrendering to the sexually suggestive spirit of the proceedings. A woman really needs to have nerves of steel to refer to her breasts as “doodh ki factory” The writing and direction in a film such as this is either a sign of absolute innocence about political correctness or indicative of an obstinate disregard for all good taste. Take your prick...I mean, pick.