Milap Zaveri leaves no stone unturned and no pun undistributed in his quest to make a sex comedy that will make its competitors appear tame. Zaveri’s goal is to plumb the depths rather than reach for the sky, and from that point of view, his sex comedy Mastizaade is an unqualified success.
The similarities with Kya Kool Hain Hum 3, which opened just a week ago on January 22, are numerous. Both the movies revolve around a pair of male friends as desperate for sex as a vampire is for blood. Both films share a screenplay writer (Mushtaq Sheikh) and a dialogue writer (Zaveri), Tusshar Kapoor (who is to this genre what Govinda is to comedy), the depiction of Thailand as a haven for sex, well endowed women in minimal clothing, Sushmita Mukherjee, the large-lipped Gizele Thakral, a background score filled with orgasmic moans, and the misplaced suggestion that our leading men are wizards in the bedroom. While Kya Kool Hain Hum 3 used sexualised versions of Hindi movies as a plot device, Mastizaade has pornography-laced commercials. This movie’s trump card is former porn star Sunny Leone, who appears in a double role as Laila and Lily. No matter who she is playing, she is always in clothes a few sizes too small, all the better to showcase her physical bounty.
The plot revolves around Sunny (Kapoor) and Aditya (Vir Das), advertising filmmakers by day who are round-the-clock dedicated to stoking their libidos. They pretend to be sex addicts in order to meet women. When Sunny falls for Laila and Aditya for Lily, they decide to go straight. After all, she is the woman of their dreams: she looks like a porn star and therefore must be good wife material.
Laila, however, wants nothing more than a roll in the hay with Sunny (this is the kind of film in which Tusshar Kapoor is a high-in-demand lust object). Lily, on the other hand, is betrothed to the wheelchair-bound Deshpremee (Shaad Randhawa). Since Mastizaade is an all-offence kind of movie, there is no point getting worked up about the numerous digs at disability, just as there are no tears to be shed over a poor horse that is subjected to an indignity that should befall no man, woman or beast. Yet, it is hard not to be riled by Suresh Menon’s flamboyantly gay stereotype. Menon has played this role before, but he has never been as vituperative as in Mastizaade, in which he pants after Kapoor’s Sunny. If there was ever a case for repealing Article 377 and ending the criminalisation of homosexuality and all the prejudice associated with it is, this is it.
The movie’s general disgust with the idea of gay sex proves that for all its outrageousness, Mastizaade is as tame as they come. The jokes are weak, while Zaveri’s taste for zany puns has soured. The filmmaker’s ability to find sexual innuendo in everyday situations and objects is truly staggering. Here is a man who cannot look at fruit or a pole without losing his equilibrium. From peeling a banana to opening a bank account, from light sockets to soda bottles, Mastizaade pulls out all the stops and lets the ribald humour gush for 108 minutes. The go-for-broke climax, set on a conveyor belt that is lathered with the kind of glue used to trap rodents, is more apt than the filmmakers realise. When you wallow in the depths, it is bound to get sticky.
