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.
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.