'Mastiii 4' Movie Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Stunted Male Mind

It’s only noon and I’ve already had three showers today. Under normal circumstances, I’d say it’s because I had to step out in the morning and Mumbai’s AQI is beyond redemption. Under normal circumstances, that’s a perfectly valid reason. But these are extraordinary circumstances. I stepped out to watch a morning show of Mastiii 4, a cinematic pollutant so noxious that I’ve been frantically trying to wash off its fumes after reaching home. Say what you may about a Milap Zaveri film, but it works wonders for my personal hygiene.

Forget traffic, dust, air, choked lungs, watery eyes; there is nothing like a sex comedy (?) so fundamentally broken that the only thing remotely sexual during the screening was the tension I shared with the exit door. I longed for release. The only infidelity in this franchise about three obliviously creepy middle-aged husbands desperate to sleep with other women is the emotional cheating I engaged in after years of unwavering loyalty to my profession. I had vowed never to walk out of a film before it ends, no matter how insufferable. But Mastiii 4 pushed me to my limit. So now I must confess. My body remained in the hall, but my mind strayed elsewhere to greener pastures: like the shower(s) I needed, the conked laptop awaiting repairs, the mysterious stains on the seats of this theatre frequented by college couples, the soothing misogyny and jingoism of future Bollywood productions.

I’m also more convinced than ever that AI cannot replace humans in storytelling. How can a machine replicate the whims of brains that come up with the following ideas? An animal mating expert calling himself a “master-baiter” only to arouse a lusty tiger (licking its lips) in its enclosure. A white woman named “Rosemary Carlo” because she’s seducing a car salesman. A dog, rat, rabbit and hyena jumping the mating expert because he is sprayed with pheromones. Seeing a camel and wondering why “he has two humps and I have none”. A Bhojpuri-speaking gangster named Don Pablo: the consequence of a Bihari mother’s one-night stand with Putin. The rhyming of Singham, lingam and chewing-gum. A cobra’s fangs clamped onto a man’s penis as he begs other men to suck out the poison. Two friends discussing what their third friend ate for dinner based on the nuanced stink of his farts (“is that Hing in the rajma I smell?”). A Thai massage girl speaking in a man’s voice to shock her titillated client. The three men accidentally hiding under a patient’s bed only to smear his excreta on their faces. A comatose man brought back to life after he is defibrillated by hot irons on his nipples. Why are you still reading? Are you not emotionally cheating on this review yet?

Not even two Baazigar references in the film can soften me this time. It’s true that a laughably offensive sex comedy, by nature, is a relic of previous Bollywood generations; what was funny yesterday is rapey and wrong today. But Mastiii 4 is not only anti-woke, it’s also anti-art, anti-humanity, anti-life, anti-sense and anti-anti. The first three movies may have happened when cancel culture wasn’t a thing, but I believe that they were partly the reason cancel culture came into existence. And yet here we are, on number 4, gloriously legitimising pervert-uncle humour, objectification of female bodies and the porn-addled male gaze under the garb of chastening men for being men. It’s the worst paradox of our times.

Tragically, Mastiii 4 comes close to actually exploring the new-age concept of an open marriage; the three buffoons in it (I refuse to get into names and details) ask their wives for a “love visa” — the license to live out their wildest and most sordid fantasies for one week so that all temptations are over. It backfires when they realise that their spouses get the same license and there’s a vast imbalance of choices available to both sexes. It inadvertently bumps into a good point, like a blind weasel on wheels. Of course, the film’s message is that open marriages, polyamory and cheating are bad — all of which is conveyed with the maturity of 10-year-old schoolkids giggling in biology lectures and 12-year-olds drawing phalluses on the walls of the principal’s office.

It takes some doing to conceive such a movie at this stage of natural evolution. It’s an anti-Darwinian miracle, really. A director once told me that he based his script in London for the sole purpose of fulfilling his fantasy of traveling abroad. He could never afford to go otherwise. A fair hustle, I thought. Mastiii 4 is based around there too, but every second shot is also a close-up of model-coded girls flaunting plenty of skin, bikinis, catwalks and roleplay kinks. Every third shot features a horny animal in heat. Every fourth shot shows an average-looking man with a woman way out of his league. Make of that what you will.