Thai Massage addresses the sex drive in elders

The title is a bit of a putoff. Thai Massage is not the sleazy morning show perverts’ paradise that it sounds like. On the contrary, there are spurts of sensitivity to be encountered throughout the sex comedy, marred, alas, by bouts of clunky writing and shoddy narration.

Thailand is glimpsed only in passing when in fact much of the theme of the sexagenarian (the sex in the term acquires a growing relevance) and his libido are geared towards Thailand.

Budgetary constraints pull down what could have an important film on sex and the 60-plus patriarch played with pungent panache by Gajraj Rao who is becoming quite an expert at playing 60-plus men with an active libido. He did it in the game-changing Badhaai Ho and recently in Maja Ma . In Thai Massage, Atmaram, a working-class simpleton widower, he raises the issue again when he wakes one morning to discover he can no longer rise to the occasion.

But what occasion? Atmaram’s morning walk friend wants to know. “If you don’t need a power supply why have electricity? You should consider this as a blessing.”

But Atmaram refuses to believe that his sex life and his sex drive must die with his wife. This is where director Mangesh Hadawale kicks in with some solid groin gyan giving the 60-plus hero a boost beyond aphrodisiacs by suggesting that it is okay to have libido after the ‘permissible age’. And who decides what is the cutoff point for sexual desire?

There have been film on women’s sexuality, notably Alankrita Shrivastav’s Lipstick Under My Burqa where Ratna Pathak Shah was shown to enjoy male company when women her age are supposed to look after their grandchildren and do pooja-paath all day long.

Gajraj Rao’s Atmaram also refuses to be slotted. The setting is Ujjain where even the plants at jogger’s park have ears. All hell breaks loose when Atmaram’s three-year-old visit to Thailand is exposed to the family. After the initials haws and hey-bhagwans, Atmaram refuses to believe he did anything wrong.

Rao carries his character’s moral conventions well on his shoulders. He is an actor who doesn’t mind sticking his neck out. It is a stroke of sheer luck that Rao gets the criminally underrated Divyenndu Sharma as an unlikely compatriot in his libidinous plans.

Together Rao and Sharma whip up a whoop. Sharma’s Santulan is initially shown to be poking fun at Atmaram’s naïve sexual desires. But Santulan, clearly a right-winger, soon comes to terms with the fact that there is more to ageing than morning walks, satsangs and laughter clubs.

There is Atmaram’s Thai encounter with a Russian girl (played by the charming Alina Zasobina) which shows that not all back-packed tourists are frauds and that not every touristic encounter is time pass.

As Atmaram, so too the film finds it bearing by exploring the darker side of ageing. We don’t really speak of parents or grandparents’ sexual desires. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Thai Massage acknowledges the existence of the sex drive in autumnal-wintry people. For that itself, it deserves to be seen and applauded.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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