Just a little tenderness

Illustration/Uday Mohite

"Look at me. I don't even know how to laugh at myself. I've not spoken to a woman for 12 years. Whenever I talk to men it's just swearing, complaining, taunting. They never talk about… mankind, health, music, gossip, happiness, dance, just… this and that!"

So says Jackie Shroff in the middle of Mast Mein Rehne Ka (Prime Video). This is not a perfect film. But I would say it is a heroic film, saturated with something deeply missing in our times: tenderness (It's also very funny).

Set in an older central Mumbai, Mast Mein Rehen Ka (MMRK) follows four protagonists - some migrants, some long-time dwellers. Each is a little lonely, and somewhat alone. Or are they?

Jackie Shroff is Kamath, a widower. Like the decaying art-deco building he lives in, he too is decrepit, his body a faded memory of beauty, isolated among the impending high-rises, just like the news in newspapers is lost among the marketing flyers. He lives his days with the particular discipline of the elderly, concluding with a strong beer, until he passes out. When a burglar breaks in one night, he wakes up and insists the burglar kill him, terrorising the burglar. This sets off a chain of events which lead to his friendship with Mrs. Handa (Neena Gupta), also widowed, also a victim of the same bumbling burglar. We know the burglar also as a tailor, foolish but beset by poverty, navigating a rickety path between debt and desire. Everyone has many realities.

MMRK is not a film about love - which is what makes it so great. It is a film about how people learn to connect with others and what that requires in a world increasingly trained to disconnect. Connecting means crossing some boundaries, revealing some desires and spending time together. Finally, it means learning to see yourself with a little tenderness, being able to receive it from others, as much as giving it.

It is not disbelief but cynicism you must suspend while watching MMRK. The realist turn of the last two decades means mainstream films have been studded with smart observational detail about quirky characters. MMRK is different because humorous detail is never divorced from empathy, never used to aggrandize the director's cleverness. While cognisant of the city's violent power dynamics, MMRK has amused affection and acceptance of its denizens - beer drinking, chicken lollipop eating, faral sharing, pickle coveting, potty-problem solving, precarious and preposterous bumblers all. And best of all? It has Rakhi Sawant who actually says #BoreMatKarYaar in one scene - who is filmed with the greatest tenderness of all, and intimate awareness of her quintessential Bombay legacies. A rare film, quite at ease with women.

In an unstated but evident way, Mast Mein Rehne Ka is a film about masculinity. Yaniki, with quiet self-confidence, it takes on the masculinist world-view where domination is touted as the only truth, a crushing inevitability. It reveals the loneliness at the core of this world-view and asserts that intimacy and connection - the refusal of loneliness - is an emotional and political counter to this world view. And intimacy, it reminds us, is not only about sharing pain, but sharing enjoyment of each other with our differences. In a time obsessed with size, MMRK might seem like a small film (just like this small column). But it holds a big idea, waiting patiently for us to claim it.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com