Mastram’ turns out to be much too banal
Film: "Mastram"
Cast: Rahul Bagga, Tara Alisha
Director: Akhilesh Jaiswal
Rating: *** (3 stars)
If you were a boy growing up in a certain kind of household or hostel in North India in the 70s and 80s, chances were you were glad-handing pulpy porn booklets, written on cheap yellow paper, by a certain gent named Mastram. No one knew who the author/authors was/were, but the phenomenal popularity of the series made the ‘Mastram’ brand name an urban legend.
I’ve only heard of these ‘books’ but never laid my eyes on them. What I’ve got though, from an avid reader then who is a respectable middle-aged character now, that they were the first ‘coming of age’ of a whole generation of eager young fellows. So I was all set for a healthy dose of smut from the film ‘Mastram’, and all kinds of intriguingly meta possibilities – the film being a fictionalised account of a ‘fictional’ writer.
But it turns out to be much too banal. Rajaram ( Bagga) is an earnest, bored bank official who thinks he has a great talent for writing. He gets full support from his wife (Berry), but only derision from everyone else, including the local publisher he takes his manuscript to. He is urged to add some `masala’ and return. On his way, he has an epiphany involving a sexy woman, and clothes slithering, and much moaning and sighing. He writes that up, it gets into print, and gets lapped up. And Mastram is born, working stiff by day, and purveyor of illicit sex by night.
Except for one sequence that could justifiably be termed outright ‘hot’, an adolescent phrase just right for the mostly adolescent readership, there is nothing in the film which is strictly for adults. The situations that turn Rajaram into Mastram—when he looks at his comely neighbour, for example, or a grocer’s shapely assistant—are bland. So is Rajaram-Mastram. The re-creation of an era, and why this series became so successful, which could have lent the film some heft, is wholly missing from the story.
Mastram: wistful look at a porn-writer's life
If in "Mastram", you expect a Boogie Nights kind of all-encompassing panoramic peek-a-boob...sorry boo, at the porn industry, then you are in for an anti-climax. "Mastram" chronicling the life-story of a man who would be kink (y), is a sad, glum, wistful look at the life of litterateur who was persuaded to give porn a chance, just to make ends meet.
Director Akhilesh Jaiswal lets the porn writer Rajaram, aka Mastram, played by Rahul Bagga, grow within a space where sex is a synonym for survival. He must write dirty books to make a living. In Guru Dutt's "Pyaasa", the poet Vijay faced the same dilemma. Write pulp, or perish, he was told. Vijay preferred to perish.
Rajaram is a product of consumerist culture. With creditors knocking down his door, he chooses a life after debt.
For those expecting to see the rise and fall (and I don't mean that in any other but the most physical sense) of a generation fed on porn, "Mastram" is not your cup of tea. It never goes into the author's libidinous craft. It stays in his mind, probes and punctuates the protagonist's perverse practice dispassionately.
There is a pronounced absence of frenzied excitement in the narrative. If seen as a mating game, then "Mastram" is a lazy evening of half-hearted copulation. We get to meet the man behind the orgasms. We feel the pain beneath the porn. Director Akhilesh Jaiswal tears at the layers of titillation and touches the pain and loneliness of an artiste compelled to sell sex when all he wants is to write literary works.
Story: A fictional biography of a writer who craves to exploit his literary skills, but ends up with creative writing for carnal consumption only. He becomes the hottest name in pornographic pulp fiction.
Must masturbate mentally ... Must read more intellectually stimulating porn ... Must sex-educate the self through pulp fiction of the sleaziest kind ... Must update self on the birds and the bees... Because life's a b***h and love is a fantasy between (book) covers and because 'Mastram' says it's a 'must'! Yes, Mastram was India's Shakespeare of sleaze, the bard of the bawdy who controlled all the mind-fornication there was, that held all of North India in its 'jerky' grip through the 80s.
Rajaram (Rahul), a M.A in Hindi, quits his bank job in Manali to pursue his dream of being a novelist. He finds support only in his sanskari wife (Tara), and even after desperate attempts, all publishers reject his literary work because his kahanis have the matter but lack the 'meat'. Realizing that sex sells like hot samosas and lust 'whets' hungry minds over literature, the struggling Premchand in him begins churning out porn-packed in-paperbacks, under the pseudonym of 'Mastram'.
His lurid stories ('Baniye Ka Lollipop', 'Sheela Ka Yowan') discreetly called 'woh-wali kitaab' becomes a best-seller. But what happens when the covers are pulled off his identity and he's exposed as the man who sells sexual fantasies for a living?
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The 98-minute film moves at a languid pace for the first 30 minutes.
Then Rajaram becomes Mastram and brings in the much-needed sexual energy into the proceedings, which sadly is the only selling point of the film.
Bagga, as both Rajaram and Mastram, is a mixed bag of emotions.
In some scenes he succeeds in bringing about the nuances of a novelist who writes porn to earn money. In others, he looks lost and unconvincing.
Director Jaiswal, who wrote Gangs of Wasseypur, seems unable to make up his mind as to how to firmly hold the narrative.
The result then is a film that fails to make you feel good.
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