The Grand Masti single-screen experience (and what it says about us)

By Suprateek Chatterjee Indra Kumar doesn’t make movies for critics or multiplex audiences – the filmmaker has often gone on record to say critics should be banned (in this video , he explains how “the problem with critics is that they come to watch movies as critics”) . The director’s filmography – comprising cinematic atrocities such as Dil, Beta, Ishq, Dhamaal, Double Dhamaal and, of course, Masti – has always appealed to the so-called ‘single-screen’ audience. Keeping this in mind, I decided to skip the customary media screening at an upmarket multiplex and watch Kumar’s latest offering, Grand Masti, where most of his target audience watches its movies. Setting: Matinee show of Grand Masti, Gaiety, Bandra (West), Mumbai On a hot and humid Friday morning, a large number of moviegoers — mostly college-going kids bunking lectures — mill around outside Gaiety, one of three single-screen theatres in Bandra’s G7 ‘multiplex’. Most of them are male, skinny and clad almost uniformly in full-sleeved shirts with flared collars and jeans. The women, who are fewer, have either come as part of mixed groups or with dates. Touts walk around this boisterous crowd, most of whom are lining up to get into the hall, offering a balcony ticket in ‘black’ for Rs 150, more than double the actual price: Rs 70. Bargaining with them is futile; attempt to do so, and they irritably point to a board that tells you all shows of the movie are sold out for the next four days. Many of these kids look like they’re below 18 – the minimum age to watch an ‘A’ rated film like Grand Masti. However, security at Gaiety is lax; with the exception of a few unlucky boys who didn’t have enough facial hair to appear old enough by any standards, no one gets asked to show any ID. [caption id=“attachment_1109155” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Inside the cavernous theatre, it sounds like a veritable fish market. The raising of the red velvet curtain covering the screen is greeted with applause. Then come the advertisements. An ad for a ‘gritty reboot’ TV adaptation of Mahabharata is greeted with a roar when a busty, midriff-baring actress playing the character of Draupadi appears on screen. This roar grows louder when it comes to the part where a muscled Dushasana disrobes Draupadi. Two skinny boys seated to my right join in with catcalls. A burkha-clad girl to my left looks slightly embarrassed but giggles nevertheless. You can all but smell the hormones. This is followed by a trailer for Ragini MMS 2, starring Sunny Leone and…her assets? I saw characters’ lips moving but didn’t hear a single word, thanks to the omnipresent roar reverberating around the theatre for the entire duration of the trailer (as well as Gaiety’s outdated sound system). Finally, the movie begins. Grand Masti, as trailers indicate, is an unabashedly lewd sex comedy. It has a plot that borrows elements from the 2012 Hollywood disaster American Reunion, but follows a story arc similar to its 2004 predecessor Masti. The male leads, comprising Viveik Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani and Riteish Deshmukh, are now in their 30s but are obviously playing college students. The female cast, which includes Manjari Fadnis, Sonalee Kulkarni, Karishma Tanna, Bruna Abdullah, Maryam Zakaria and debutant Kainaat Arora, are there to represent the various stereotypes allotted to women in Indian society: coy housewife, overenthusiastic mother, corporate bitch, slut, slut and slut, respectively. Did I say ‘slut’ too many times? That’s probably because the name of the college our heroes go to is called Shree Lalchand University of Technology and Sciences, which abbreviates to _____ [5 marks]. I won’t pass judgement on the quality (or lack thereof) of the jokes in this film. Here’s a quick list of some moments during the film where the house-full audience roared, applauded and high-fived each other. These are: Oberoi, Deshmukh and Shivdasani explain a different version of A-B-C in which the audience is shown close-up shots of uncredited women’s posteriors and breasts. Shivdasani works in a bank, which gets held up by a group of armed robbers. He cannot press the silent alarm under his desk because he has to keep his hands up in the air, so he instead focuses on staring at the cleavage of a Caucasian woman whose breasts are heaving out of fear. This gives him an erection, which sets off the alarm. At a college reunion, a busty Kainaat Arora tells a salivating Oberoi that she now owns “do badi doodh ki factoriyaan”. At aforementioned college reunion, the trio imagines several (yep, Caucasian) women walking around the campus in bikinis. One walks up to them and asks for the time; Deshmukh stutters and says “Bra-panties.” When she says, “Excuse me?” he replies with “Mera matlab hai… baarah paintees. 12.35 pm!” Okay, so here’s the thing. Grand Masti treats its female characters reprehensibly, mostly as sex objects or cardboard cut-outs, but it is hardly the first movie in history to have done so. We’ve all been young and immature. I remember being 15 and thinking American Pie 2 was, like, the best movie ever. As long as there are hormonal teenagers, there will exist a market for such films, and one could argue that there should be one. All Indra Kumar and Co are doing is filling a need that already exists. Either way, didn’t many of us go and laugh our guts out at films like The Hangover, which is hardly something that meets any standard of political correctness or egalitarianism? The problem is that we don’t try to meet any standard at all. Give me a witty double-meaning joke and I’ll laugh at it. Show me well-toned, bikini-clad bodies – I’m not complaining. Tell me a story I haven’t seen or heard before. Thwart my expectations. Don’t give me stale, BBM-forward-level jokes I heard in college eight years ago. Surprise me a little by giving the female characters at least a second dimension, if not a third. If you must make a terrible joke, try not to spend an additional 30 seconds of screen time having your characters explain the joke. But I’m part of a minuscule minority. As the audience at Gaiety proved, we like seeing the same thing over and over again. As our current scenario proves, misogyny is an integral part of our society. We’re so sexually repressed and our movies are otherwise so sanitised that the very idea of sexuality or profanity even being depicted on screen entertains us. This is why we roar when two people kiss. This is why we laugh and applaud when people say ‘ma*****od’ on screen, even though some of us may say or hear it often enough in real life. Finally, the biggest problem is that we don’t seem to know where reel life ends and real life begins. In the interval, there was a commotion in the balcony at Gaiety; people had discovered that Kainaat Arora was in the theatre, watching the movie from the last row. Enamoured young men hesitantly went up to her and asked if she could pose for a picture; she happily obliged. The two skinny kids sitting to my right were, like everyone else, craning their necks to get a better look at her. “Which one is this?” asked one. “Arrey, the one with the big doodh ki factoriyaan,” replied his friend. They laughed and high-fived each other. (Suprateek Chatterjee is editor of Visual Disobedience_, a community for emerging indie artists, and a freelance writer. In his spare time, he likes to compose music with his electro-rock band_ Vega Massive and his Twitter handle is @SupraMario.)