Movie Review: Mastram
Rating: 4/5 Stars (www.koimoi.com)
What’s Good: It is a risky film that arouses and amazes with its unique and unusual story. With writer’s block prevailing as a persistent problem, here’s a story that isn’t even remotely heard of.
What’s Bad: I found nothing to complain about this film. It is an original, semi-autobiographical story with every intended ingredient right in place.
Loo break: None
Watch or Not?: Mastram is a film that must definitely not be missed. It is a indulgent tale which makes for quite an unconventional watch. Requiring its audiences to remain consistently emotionally invested in the film, the narrative is alluring and fiddles with the sexual repression that is ingrained in the Indian psyche with the hypocrisy that plays an accomplice.
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The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak (www.livemint.com)
The 98-minute movie is set in the 1980s, which is as exciting as the sixties for a section of Bollywood. Before he reinvents himself as a successful planter of wet dreams, Mastram goes by the name of Rajaram (Rahul Bagga), the television actor from Powder), a luckless writer who’s trying to hawk his literary masterpieces to unwilling publishers. In his new avatar, he gets money without fame—since he’s hiding behind a pen name—but still craves respectability. Writer’s block beckons when Rajaram’s creative juices begin to run dry. After all, how many different ways can there be to describe the old in-out?
Since the story isn’t real but imagined, Jaiswal feels no need to explain how porn publishing works. He doesn’t tell us about Mastram’s competitors. Was he the only one? The first one? He doesn’t deconstruct Mastram’s characterisations or comment on his florid prose. He doesn’t probe the writer’s fantasies about his wife having a Savita Bhabhi moment or two.
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Rating: 1.5/5 stars ( www.indianexpress.com)
f 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.
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