Last Man in Tower Movie Review:

In the impressively economical 94-minute film Last Man in Tower, Manoj Bajpayee plays Yogesh Mishra, a man of many words who also somehow maintains a calm exterior. Around the midpoint, there comes a turn when the usually calm Yogesh finally raises his voice — it’s when he first sees traces of immorality in people he trusted to be how own — only to return to a state of his quiet rebellion. Manoj Bajpayee tunes his performance with such imperfection, that it’s almost enough to carry the entire film on its own. Fortunately, there are many other things going for this film. 

In Last Man in Tower (LMIT), members of a housing society find themselves at crossroads — while most of them are willing to sell their flats to a reputed builder Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), who desires to build his own Shanghai in the heart of Mumbai, all that’s standing in his way is Yogesh Mishra aka Master ji. As his support slowly withers away, Master ji soon finds himself to be the last man standing against a real estate giant and, in effect, against the changing idea of a society.

Director: Ben Rekhi

Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Divya Dutta, Boman Irani, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Sukant Goel, Harish Khanna

Things are never as squeaky-clean as they appear to be — It holds true for the relationships, as well the tone this film is going for. In the early parts, LMIT might appear like a sweet middle-class fable, and perhaps thats the illusion it’s trying to break. Everything in Bombay has a price, a point of malleability, and the impenetrable too have a threshold point. No moral rigidity is tall enough to overpower the dream of high-rises and tall buildings. Directed by Ben Rekhi, the film keeps you guessing about its mood. After it’s initial everyday sweetness, the film slowly makes space for moments of dark humour, where even scenes with grim, discomforting conversations are underlined with a playful background score. Gradually, the narrative acquires garb of a thriller, operating with a macabre quality as Master ji becomes increasingly isolated in his fight for self-preservation. The constant reminders of the deadline Dharmen Shah has given these flat-owners serve as a ticking timebomb, adding to the sense of dread.

Dharmen Shah makes fleeting appearances as the film’s antagonist-equivalent. While its tempting to paint him as a classic evil man, there comes a point where he too draws his boundaries of wrong-doings — until a scene towards the end when we realise why people like him can afford to draw that line. Divya Dutta’s Sangeeta Puri is the most emblematic of the film’s moral standing. She is someone with her share of wounds and heartache even as she comes off as oblivious to the wounds causing by her actions. The actor is brilliant in the handful of moments she is allowed to shine. 

In what can be called a misstep of sorts, after keeping the audience unsure with its lack of tonal rigidity, LMIT eventually finds its way back to Master ji as the moral guide. During a much-awaited confrontation scene, Dharmen Shah says, this world is not always about rights and wrongs,” to which Masterji responds, “It cannot function without them either.” LMIT chooses to live by Master ji’s words, even though it didn’t have to. Master ji gets the chance to take a moral high ground for a large part — until he realises the flawed idea that drives his grit and resilience about saving his ‘home’. There are also glimpses of a time where Master ji wasn’t perhaps as virtuous. In a scene, Gaurav (Sukant Goel) reminds him how being gifted with books always came with a pressure of reading them urgently. Yet, while misguided in a strange, melancholic way, Masterji remains a hero. At one point, Master ji pleads to all the birds to take him away from the human beings around him — yes, it gets as blatant at places because we see the world change from his perspective. The film also ends with a tragic epiologue visual of those who wronged him. 

A more curious film would have also desired to explore the relationship between Master ji and his young neighbour, two distinct personalities who end up in the same boat of misfits standing against a compliant society, but the film remains tethered to Master ji and his solitary struggles. 

Amidst such a morally driven narrative, writer Sooni Taraporevala, from Aravind Adiga’s novel of the same name, finds moments that explore the grey area between the binaries. At one point, Master ji ponders about how much his value as a human being is attached to what others perceive of him. Mrs Puri, while dealing with her moral vagrance, gets a moment of outburst at her husband who was indifferent to her struggles in raising their differently-abled son together. 

But above all, while set in 2010, this is a story about the defeat of middle-class idealism in a way. Sometimes, what’s bigger than the fear of violence or poverty is the fear of not becoming as rich as the neighbour next door. Last Man in Tower reminds you of our middle-class frailities that are always lurking around at the corner, waiting to lunge at us when we are at our most vulnerable.