Mast Mein Rehne Ka review: Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta film is feel-good and effortless

Mast Mein Rehne Ka review: The slice-of-life comedy, also starring Rakhi Sawant, is aided by great performances and storytelling.

Leave aside good messaging or bad, strong filmmaking or not — we’re witnessing a spanking-new mini-renaissance in Hindi cinema. After the staid and occasionally engaging Sam Bahadur and baffling monstrosity that was Animal, two films from two starkly contrasting worlds and raisons d'être — Joram and The Archies — vie for the audience’s attention (and I’m not even considering the perfect streaming vehicle Kadak Singh on grounds of relative recentness). And this is just 10 days of December.

Mast Mein Rehne Ka review: Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta play neighbours in this slice of life film.

In the middle of all this splendid plenty, Vijay Maurya’s Mast Mein Rehne Ka breaks the mould somewhat. Minus any pre-release publicity, minus a hyped star cast, minus any expectation for the moviegoer, this sweet little diptych achieves what most of our recent big-screen and OTT releases (maybe with the exception of 12th Fail, with its austerity and heart) have failed to.

At the outset a slice-of-life geriatric romance straight out of a Modern Love: Mumbai episode propelled by the Macguffin of neighbourhood robberies, Mast Mein Rehne Ka hits you like a bolt from the blue (of course without the intention to hurt). It is incredibly well-acted and beautifully shot, delivering not only a winsome portmanteau of two shorter films bumping into each other as if in a city park to say hello, but a stirring commentary on multifarious lonelinesses and an indulgent portrait of the city itself.

Jackie Shroff is Kamath, a taciturn and lonely 75-year-old widower who likes to spend his time gazing at the leaping waves or guzzling frothy beer and chicken lollipop every week. Early into the film, his house is broken into by Nanhe, a down-on-his-luck tailor trying his best to stand on his two feet in the city of dreams. An anticlimactic scuffle ensues and the clumsy debutant bungles his first-ever burglary. Kamath survives the blow to his nose and — after a vaudeville encounter with law enforcement helped by the rappy title song — runs into Mrs Handa (Neena Gupta) a potty-mouth but effervescent sexagenarian who has just returned from Canada.

Yet, what heightens your adoration of this film in light of the above observations is the fact that it doesn’t allow weighty trifles to encumber its storytelling. Director Maurya and cinematographer Nagaraj Rathinam are generous in allowing two out of every five frames to cliché and there are lines that feel especially stagey in a script that is otherwise free-flowing and inventive. But as I said, Mast Mein Rehne Ka is the first acolyte of its title, and that isn’t to celebrate the low-hanging fruit but to applaud the authenticity and purpose of telling the story and eschewing the frills.

Monica Panwar and Abhishek Chauhan play the other two protagonists in the quartet that are somehow reminiscent of the crackerjack lead pair of Joyland. He is Nanhe, the bumbling, soft-spoken migrant tailor intent on pursuing his practice no matter the circumstances. She is the loutish tramp with boot polish on her face, making a living on the streets and telling off anyone at the drop of a hat. While Chauhan feels both restrained and strained in his absorption of the character, Panwar has a raw ferocity about her, and I have to say her submission to a character that’s so far away from her station in life as I understand it — is rocket fuel for the audience’s investment in the story.

What also bolsters the film’s self-conviction is its effortless meta-ness. Shroff’s newfound place in the pop discourse, of the congenial, jhaad-gifting culinary guru, lends itself well to his character’s avuncular ease. What he injects anew into the character is, of course, his vegetative melancholy. Gupta as the fearless and admittedly loco sardarni is obviously (or not) a spin-off from her own public image as the charming, stereotype-busting late bloomer. The actor exercises such elan as Mrs Handa that it becomes hard to fixate on the occasional corny lines she’s given to mouth. Of course, she gets the best ones in the script, too, such as the one where she lovingly schools Kamath in the art of discretion when it comes to men making comments about women’s bodies. And it’s a rollicking scene.

Rakhi Sawant might be the best part about the film.

And now, the best part. The film stars Rakhi Sawant as Bilkis aka Bimla, some kind of a former starlet who manages an entertainment company and runs a tight ship. She has recently married another washed-up actor — and, just like Sawant herself recently, changed her religion, converting this time to Hinduism. In the context of Sawant’s own adventures in the social media universe and her undisputed unofficial status as the queen of cringe, this is some inspired casting, and what makes it even better is that Sawant doesn’t disappoint one bit. You just wonder: why has it taken so long for this to happen?

Despite its contemporary treatment of the relationships between both its lead pairs, their dénouements within the film are cathartically and delightfully old-fashioned. Rani and Nanhe, united by a carnal curiosity that directs its gaze on the man’s chaste status, find common ground that inverts heteronormative dynamics. Kamath and Handa’s relationship, though fuelled on the surface by a late-stage hankering for thrill and booze, is built on friendship that is free of the burden of conventional attraction, even though she misses her flight back to Canada to be with Kamath — as what, no one can say for sure.