Indra Kumar’s Masti , which was released on 9 April, 2004, subverts, some would say, perverts the Dil Chahta Hai male-bonding fable with loads and loads of double-meaning, risque jokes, pssst-pssst provocation and finally a neatly “conservative” ending that says, ‘Hey guys, masti done, extra-marital peccadillos over. Now it’s time to tell you that marriages are for keeps.’
Meet Amar Prem. That’s the names of the three roving-eyed heroes. And while their wives stay at home skirt-chasing is their game…. Misogyny, homophobic, and sexist jokes abound. And if you thought upmarket actors were above double-meaning jokes, then wait till you hear Vivek Oberoi and Ajay Devgan comparing wives and girlfriends to ghar ka khana and biryani.
Burp re burp! But hey, it’s all in fun! And our three principal ever-grin stars of the peep-peep-pssst-pssst show Meet (Oberoi), Amar (Ritesh Deshmukh), and Prem (Shivdasani) seem to be full of the fun factor in the funda factory. The actors give their roles a certain zany twist which goes a long way in preventing the satire from falling apart under the pressure of spatial and time-related excesses.
Ribald comedies and Masti undoubtedly belongs there—cannot be sustained for the average length of a Hindi movie. Alas you can take the average movie out of director Indra Kumar, but you can’t take Indra Kumar out of standard preoccupations. Hence the humour hinges more on the trio’s proclivity to say the lines with the right sleazy stress without causing a moral distress among family audiences.
Unfortunately , Indra Kumar’s Gujarati brand of satire (on full display in his earlier films specially Ishq) when combined with Milap Zaveri’s urbane boys’ backroom chortles , yields what can only be branded a pandemonium of precocity and perversity.
Specially over-the-top and elongated are the gay jokes. There’re two highly unnecessary and prolonged jokes about oral sex involving Satish Shah, Ritesh and Aftab .
Welcome to the new world! Indra Kumar seems stuck between the traditional way of doing a sex comedy and the more upmarket trendy nudge-nudge-wink-wink style. The end-result is more shriek than chic.
The ongoing mockery of Satish Shah’s homophobic character by Aftab and Ritesh is inspired by Shah Rukh and Saif in Kal Ho Na Ho, while their names Amar and Prem are not so much tribute to the Rajesh Khanna romantic classic as Raj Kumar Santoshi’s slapstick bonanza Andaz Apna Apna where Aamir and Salman were named Amar and Prem.
If you peer really closely at the mirth-worth of Masti you’ll see elements from several other comedies . Ritesh’s choppy relationship with his wife (Genelia) and mother-in-law Archana Puran Singh is lifted straight from Vikram Bhatt’s Awaara Paagal Deewana which in turn was lifted from Hollywood’s The Whole Nine Yards. Like the two earlier films Ritesh is an oppressed dentist. His track with ‘patient’ Rakhi Sawant , replete with cleavage jokes, ends with the ‘lady’ turning out to be transvestite. …
Cut to Ritesh cleaning his mouth with a toiletbowl scrubber.
Ha ha. Throughout the partially-amusing sex-comedy you get a feeling of watching a Gujarati sex comedy (“Kholne aayi…bank account,” a tart breathes into banker Aftab’s burning ears) and a Westend sex comedy .
Indra Kumar swings both ways without creating a swinging comedy.
Naughty premises about men with roving eyes aren’t strange to mainstream Hindi cinema. B.R. Chopra’s Pati Patni Aur Woh and Basu Chatterjee’s Shaukeen romanced the raunchy….but without a cyclone of lewd dialogues that seem to be an inherent part of Masti.
After a series of comic coitus interruptus when the filthy flick finally approaches its climax we’re in for trouble. The piddly hijinks at the end takes a lot of zing away from the high-energy low-octave comedy. The production values , including the music (Anand Raj Anand) and cinematography (Mazhar Kamran) are just about serviceable.
Milap Jhaveri’s dialogues are more foamy than funny. He creates a lather of lewd lines by three grownup men on a feel good phallic frolic (“Heaven is not in my feet but a little above,” Aftab tells his religious wife), and finally tries to control the crude eruption of libidinous lines with concluding homilies on the sanctity of marriage. While the rest of the film looks like a combination of Dil Chahta Hai and Jhankar Beats, the last lap of the raunchy journey resembles the Kamal Haasan hit Sathi Leelavathi.
The effect is distracting and droll. The efficacy of Masti hinges on the performances. Vivek, Aftab and Ritesh are in full bacchanalian bloom. Aftab is no stranger to comedy. He pitches in sportingly with loads of selfmocking attitude. Aftab’s expression in the sequence on a car where Satish Shah espies Ritesh doing unmentionable things , is invaluable. Ritesh as the lallu of the trio stays in character with a hang-dog lost-in-space expression . He’s a natural. Vivek’s flair for comedy flairs up in spurts of sexual innuendoes. His craving for spousal space is achingly funny.
But what, pray yell, is Ajay Devgan doing ? His post-interval appearance as a scowling cop is as rejuvenating as a dip in a pool of stagnant semen. If he’s meant to add viagara to the limp proceedings, then sorry guys..mission aborted!
The trio of wives are all ill-cast and shadowy in their motivations. Lara Dutta in an extended cameo as the femme fatale who takes the 3 heroes for a ride, once again comes across as born to the camera. She’s cool, chic urban seductive and entertaining. In brief, everything Masti isn’t.
When I asked director Indra Kumar why he turned the smutty Masti into a franchise he replied, “Because there is a market for it. And you are not part of it.”
Okay, then.
