Film: “Grand Masti”; Cast: Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Riteish Deshmukh, Sonalee Kulkarni, Bruna Abdullah, Manjari Phadnis, Kainaat Arora, Karishma Tanna and Maryam Zakaria; Director: Indra Kumar; Rating: no rating
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.
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.
The three leering…sorry leading men who come together represent the spirit of defiant devil-may-care and chase women. 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.
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. 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, you’d get into the spirit of “Grand Masti”.
To their credit Aftab Shivdasani, Vivek Oberoi and Ritesh 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.
Kumar has never been a slave to subtlety. Here he pulls out all stops. He also pulls out other ummentionable objects that are defiantly pointed into our faces.
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.
Stand-up comedian Suresh Menon shows up as a mock-villain wearing a golden underwear.
The obscenity flows out unstopped, unchecked, uncaring of rudimentary rules of decency. Having declared this to be irreverent territory director Kumar doesn’t really care how lowbrow the humour gets. And the jokes happily really plumb to unimaginable depths.
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.
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.
