Mast Mein Rehne Ka Review: Jackie Shroff, Neena Gupta's Film Is The Perfect Year-End Surprise

Mast Mein Rehna Ka Review: This underdogs' story is the underdog of the year. It comes to us with no fanfare and takes a part of our heart away. In this era of animalistic toxicity, Mast Mein Rehne Ka is filled with hope humanism and compassion. For that only, a standing ovation for actor-turned-director Vijay Maurya, who earlier directed the fairly watchable series Crash Course for Amazon Prime Video.

Maurya's foray into feature filmmaking is fresh, moving and very endearing. The chawl culture of Mumbai , those cramped gullies and lanes where most of the working class looks desperately for breathing space, is captured in all its guttural glory by Nagraj Rathinam's curious restless camera which allows the characters to use their cramped spaces as best as possible.

The characters, even the smallest like Baburam (Faisal Malik) who gives the protagonist Nanhe (Abhishek Chauhan) a shoulder in the heartless city, or for that matter Rakhi Sawant as Bilkis, the dress designer who thinks it is ‘cool’ to tell her friends to “buzz” her, are made memorable by the robust writing.

This brings me to the four main protagonists; Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta as two lonely senior citizens, who have a hard time connecting with the 'Society' culture of laughter clubs and other options for company available to the elderly in Mumbai, are in their element. Writers Maurya and Payal Arora weave a wondrous web around these two veterans. Jackie has never been more restrained and moving, Neena never more loud and, ummm, Punjabi.

She calls him ‘Madrasi’ although he patiently explains to him that every South Indian is not from Madras. But ask Neena's Prakash if she cares! In Jackie’s Kamath she finds the companion that she had no hope of finding. This is a wintry love story with plenty of snowfall and snafus.

However, the real hero of the show is our Nanhe, played with disarming bumpkin’s innocence (a successor to Raj Kapoor's Awara) the innocent boy from Gazipur who get sucked into Mumbai’s survival gimmicks and slowly begins to realize he has become the very mirror image that he feared to look in the eye.

Nanhe's growing attachment to the street beggar/sex worker Rani (Monika Panwar) could have lapsed into poverty-porn. To his credit Vijay Maurya preserves a core of integrity throughout the vigorous storytelling. There is not a dull moment in in the entire film. Mast Mein Rehna Ke is the year-end surprise that is eminently welcome after the inane toxic blockbusters of the year. Beautifully written and performed, the dialogues hit you where it hurts the most. My favourite takeaway from the unmissable upbeat voyage into loneliness, is Prakash (Neena Gupta) telling Kamath (Shroff), “There are two phases in every life, the one that we live and then other that life lives for us.”

Touché. Nanhe's cry against injustice, "Arrey, ka hai yeh saher, ka hai yeh jeevan," will ring in our ears for many weeks as the noise all around reminds us how lonely we all are, just like the characters of this unforgettable film. Maurya gives them a happy ending. That’s where cinema scores over real life.