M any years ago, Salim Javed was riding high on the Angry Young Man movement and a zillion mesmerized new converts were unapologetically buying solidly into this seductive template of violence. I asked Hrishikesh Mukherjee how an audience that loved Anand, Bawarchi and Chupke Chupke could possibly fall for this kind of cinema? He smiled benevolently and explained that a human being is many-layered, some aspects and attributes are more visible than others. There is a gentle and sensitive side to even the coarsest and crudest person. By the same token, the most refined, dignified and genteel among us, has a violence streak. Secretly, we applaud the protagonist striking at the cruel perpetrations of injustice and dadagiri. Similarly, there is also a hidden, baser, perverse and voyeuristic side to this creature who doesn’t have the courage to participate, but quietly revels in seeing and getting his quota of cheap thrills while watching pornography or sex comedies. It’s a fact of life.
While seeing Grand Masti, the latest adult Bollywood comedy, I remembered Hrishida’s golden words, especially when the whistles and catcalls at double-entrendres came on thick and fast. Bollywood has had other adult comedies (Kya Cool Hain Hum, Kya Super Cool Hain Hum, No Entry, Masti), but Grand Masti certainly races ahead in 7-star vulgarity. Sure, there was David Dhawan’s khatiya stuff and of course Dada Khondke’s bawdy material (Andheri raat mein diya tere haath mein), but for sheer audacity to unleash cheap gags (referring to food items as body parts, nariyal, numboo, kela, aam, doodh factory!) of the infantile, down-market and populist kinds (which most left behind in school and college) it’s a pioneering whopper.
Relentlessly coarse with hard close-ups of cleavages, behinds — and a first: erections — as well as names like Rose, Mary & Marlowe (wife, daughter and sister of the Hitler School principal), Grand Masti defines a new low in this category. From innocent to mischievous to naughty to vulgar, this trend, say critics, is in tandem with trajectories in other genres as well. “Violence, for example, has become much more violent (John Day), the garish, more garish and dialogue (Delhi Belly) more laced with cuss words. Low-brow humor was a tiny part of the bigger masala package with romance, action, melodrama, comedy, naach-gaana tracks dominating the show in the traditional Bollywood product. Grand Masti is path-breaking in that it makes the gross, shocking, ribald, its main ingredient,” says film critic Vinayak Chakravorty.
Hollywood too has this genre — Naked Gun, Austin Powers, American Pie, The Doctor series — but they have mostly featured second and third string actors. Here the three stars, while not exactly lighting up the marquee, are known and popular faces. Vivek Oberoi has featured in high profile films with reputed directors. Riteish Deshmukh and Aftab Shivdasani, however, have mostly done B-grade stuff, but remain popular. Why they agreed to participate in such puerile, cringy and sick trash remains a closely guarded secret.
“Not really” offers a close watcher of this genre. “The success of Kya Cool Hain Hum, Kya Super Cool Hain Hum, Masti, No Entry and their total rejection into big camps with hot-shot directors or the new exciting crossover movies leaves them little scope or choice to voice their opinion about what they want and which banner, roles, directors they wish to rock with.” Maybe.
The girls too — the bimbos not the wives — really keep beat with the horny desperados, with bindaas, dialogues and uninhibited body language that yell masti.
The fact that smut works, however, is strikingly evident from Grand Masti racing past Rs. 50 crore ($10 million) in its very first week and toting up a cool Rs. 75 crores in its second and zooming past the Rs.100 crore mark. While it undoubtedly will inspire the Grand Masti team to dream up even smuttier and crappier stuff for their next Super Grand Masti, it is ominous as a movement in a space where herd mentality rules. Having tasted thumping success with their sadak chhaap humour, others could well jump into this bandwagon, secure and confident of a pre-sold waiting, howling, excited and turned-on target’s appetite for trash masquerading as comedy. Didn’t the box office collections prove that … and to hell with the NGOs, moral police and the virtuous types, even critics who bad-mouthed the film.
It’s the heads, footfalls, numbers and tickets that count; the guilty pleasure and spine tingling thrill that travels everywhere and leaves you gasping for more, that counts; lighting up the naughty, sexciting, fantasies that can only be imagined, but never ever expressed in decent society, that counts.
Sex and comedy has always been a heady mix to woo the lowest common denominator. Today with Grand Masti rocking the audiences in multiplexes in fashionable, hi-ticket sections of metro cities, sex comedies of this regressive, libidinous, racy, bawdy kind — surprisingly green lighted by the censors — have gone legit and been accepted as another fun form of mass entertainment. And that could spell trouble, because as Hrishi-da suggested with telling insight, baser instincts are easier to seduce than nobler ones, specially in India 2013 when the going is rough, life is tough, the definition of morality is being challenged everyday, instant gratification rules and jhatka is the reigning mantra.