The hero of Harshvardhan Kulkarni’s Hunterrr, quirky tale of a man who just can’t keep his sexual urges under control, is so unabashedly cheesy, he could be a new recruit at your neighborhood cyber cafe assigned exclusively to pilot adult sites.
In the opening sequence of this brave audacious hero Mandar explains to his friends why and how intercourse is a biological need for him, like going to the bathroom. Once you accept the leading man’s attitude to sex as a mere bodily function, much of the film’s insanely uninhibited display of libidinous appetites, begins to make sense.
Mandar is an ogler, voyeur, pervert, wife-stealer and girl-friend cheater. There is nothing he wouldn’t do to hit the sack with any one woman who cares to. The narrative moves through Mandar’s sexploits with the energetic momentum of a bull in a china shop… Though what a bull would be doing in a china shop – or an ordinary guy like Mandar in the bedrooms of so many willing women – is anyone’s guess.
But Mandar is a scorer. In fact, the girl that he eventually falls in love with and marries, brings up the subject of how many women Mandar has bedded. “Ab tak chappan?” Radhika Apte’s saucy chuckle fills the air with a feverish fornicator’s flair.
This is the kind of film where raunchy rhetoric rents the humid air, rendering every girl in sight into a commodity to be evaluated and stared down and even touched. This is Dirty Picture with the dirt carpeting every move that the protagonist makes. Thankfully the film’s naughtiest nuggets are set in the 1990s when such voyeuristic intrusive behavior was not called stalking. Hindi films of that era endorsed unwanted male attention as flirtatious romancing.
Mandar is more into sex than romance and he makes bones about it. Hunterrr fills its soundtrack (Bappi Lahiri crooning, ‘Ankhen sekne do’) and visuals with sounds and images that are suggestive in a very casual, unostentatious way. The sharp editing takes us back-and-forth, or given the raunchy format, in-and-out of Mandar’s past and present. Some of the episodes like the one where the young Mandar (Vedant Muchandi) is pulled up by a leery cop for watching a porn film in a seedy theatre or the one where the grown Mandar checks out chicks with his fiance Trupti in a crowded bazaar, tend to trip over their own cleverness.
The sharp inward drawing of the breath that should have come automatically to viewers while watching Mandar drop his pants in front of sundry compliant women, just doesn’t happen. What saves the day is the warmth and honesty with which the debutant director takes Mandar on a bumpy ride through puberty and adulthood.
This is the story of a guy who thinks with one part of his body. The talented Gulshan Devaiah plays Mandar with a delightful absence of inhibition and artifice. Ironically some of the film’s best moments are those where Mandar shares buddy moments with his two child pals, played effectively by Vaibhav Tavwadi and Sagar Deshmukh. Tavwadi’s portions where he abandons his Casanova lifestyle to marry an abused girl, provide a semblance of bearing and emotional resonance to a plot that seems to go everywhere, and not get anywhere.
I am not very sure of what Hunterrr says about guys like Mandar who can’t keep their excitement in their pants. But yes, to its credit the film nowhere enjoys Mandar’s lascivious behavior. At the most the director stands back in cautious embarrassment watching the protagonist get dangerously cheesy with women. That Mandar comes out of the amorous, adventurous, humanized and untarnished is entirely due to the treatment meted out to the plot by the writer and director.
Harshavardhan Kulkarni treats his horny hero’s coming-of-age film with remarkable restrain. A couple of unnecessary love-making scenes (check out the one in the kitchen with the couple slithers on the washbasin while the married woman’s son plays outside) apart, this is a film about a guy who can’t earn the ladies’ respect because all he has to offer is a particular part of his body.
Hunterrr is a disarmingly frank sex comedy that knocks off all moral policing and strips the holier-than-thou brigade to the bare essentials. You may not like Mandar’s leery behaviour. But hell, some men do look at women as sex objects. And anyone who objects to sex is advised to look away.
Gulshan Devaiah Talks About The Role
Speaking on his delectably deviant part, Gulshan Devaiah had said, “Hunterr is a coming of age film about Mandar Ponkshe, who has a rather above average appetite for sex . It’s not really an addiction and the film is not about that. In real life my addiction is laziness I guess. Sometimes I need strong medication like a good kick on the backside to cure my laziness. It’s not difficult to understand an average guy like Mandar. All boys of a certain age and men have fantasies in their minds but only a few follow through to live them. Mandar’s desires are very relatable and so it was easy to create the character of Mandar but its based more on imagination rather than real experience.”
He added, “In my younger days, I used to get a fair amount of attention too as I was a performer on stage but I was too shy to turn that attention or attraction into vaasugiri. When an actor is truthful to the character it’s easy to do anything with conviction. There are no dialogues in Hunterrr that are put in to attract an audience or for titillation. We talk straight. There is no nudity as that’s against the law too in our country. But there is intimacy in Hunterrr and it is always a tricky one to get right . The actors need to be trusting of one another and the director must know how to direct that scene. Fortunately it was all good for us. We all took care of each other and so it was easier. My character Mandar does not do outrageous things to get attention. No body will find Mandar vulgar because he is not. He is not a stalker or an eve teaser. He takes NO as a NO. He doesn’t force himself on anyone. He only sleeps with women who want to sleep with him. Period.”
