(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed a decidedly welcome tilt towards queer themes in romantic comedies that aren’t simply of the tokenistically inclusive kind.
While good old-fashioned heteronormative rom-coms are a joy and delight and good for this gay reviewer’s heart, there’s something soul nourishing about seeing your lived experience on screen, even if your story of falling in love isn’t quite so cinematic or punctuated with perfectly timed quips and hilarious moments.
What’s so lovely about A Nice Indian Boy, directed by Roshan Sethi whose husband Karan Soni stars as lovelorn gay protagonist Naveen Gavaskar, is that it not only offers up queer representation but is one of the best rom-coms to come along in quite some time.
This gem of comedic romantic storytelling doesn’t miss a beat.
There’s not a single moment where it’s either not making you laugh, often with recognition, and this applies whether you’re gay or straight, or making you feeling something really deeply.
There’s a universality to the storytelling, drawn from the play of the same name by Madhuri Shekar, which anyone who has ever found themselves scarred by life, and that’s all of us to some extent or another, and then been attracted to someone who might just be the transformative love of their life, will immediately find familiar.
Perhaps cringingly so at times, simply because who wants to be reminded that at a time when all the pieces should be falling romantically into sigh-worthy place that we’re capable to upsetting the playing table so badly that the game doesn’t just end but is seemingly sundered completely for all time?
The nuanced, thoughtful and heartfelt brilliance of the very funny A Nice Indian Boy, which sees Naveen meet and fall heavily for a white boy Jay Kurundkar (Jonathan Groff) – his Indian surname and familiarity with the culture is explained by the fact that he was a foster kid who found a forever home with an older Indian couple who loved him unconditionally – means that even when you cringe in recogniton at how easy it is to almost ruin something good, you are given hope that that is far from the end of the story.
In fact, royally stuffing things up opens the door to Naveen finding himself in a way the timid doctor has never quite managed before, his sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) to take her own steps to independence and for Naveen’s parents, the liberally minded, meaning but taciturn Megha and Archit (Zarna Garg and Harish Patel respectively), to reveal things as real people to their kids in a way that totally changes the previously buttoned-down dynamic of the family.
A Nice Indian Boy is in many ways far more than a rom-com because it doesn’t just spin a delightfully warm and funny love story between two men who really deeply come to love each and need each other, but because it shows how one person in a family coming to terms with who they really are and expressing it in the most public of ways can radically change the lives of everyone around them.
That’s not always guaranteed of course but in this perfectly pitched story of love that defies expectations and stares down orthodox thought – at one point Archit assures a worried Megha that it doesn’t matter if people gossip about their gay son; how will that really hurt them anyway? – that’s exactly what it happens and it lends even more emotional heft to a movie not short of it in anyway.
That’s the thing about A Nice Indian Boy.
It manages to dance, Bollywood-style of course, between heartbreakingly truthful and devastatingly sad and introspective, and hilarious, relatably funny and never lose the narrative tension between the two.
That’s important if you want your rom-com to be more than fluffy bits of romantic escapism; sure, we all want to feel that we’re taken out of the everyday and plonked into a deliciously sculpted romantic fantasy but if it’s going to last in its impact beyond the credits, then it has to emotionally mean something.
And A Nice Indian Boy comes to mean a lot.
It’s not simply the coming together of a nervous doctor who thinks his well-meaning, liberal parents don’t really love each other or him, and an orphaned white boy with adoptive Indian parents who simply wants to be part of a family again.
Far more than that, A Nice Indian Boy is all about what happens when you open up your heart to whatever form life can take and embrace it without expectation or precondition and see where it will take you.
It’s going to be disruptive, bumpy and messy – how can it not be? You’re upsetting multiple apple carts at once – and you may wonder what the hell you’ve let yourself in for but it will also be the glorious making of you as you discover that beyond the same old same old lies all kinds of hope and possibility and that it might be very good indeed.
Like any good indie rom-com worth its name, A Nice Indian Boy has lots of people where truth outs and hearts are laid bare but far from feel emotionally manipulative or treacly in the extreme, it feels authentic and honest, adding even more layers of welcome raw humanity to a story happy to embrace how unpredictably agonising life can be.
Falling in love, whether it’s with the love of your life or with your family for the first time, is a joy and A Nice Indian Boy captures it all with wit, honesty and vibrant good humour and with an insightful eye on what happens when you don’t follow the plan or bow to what’s expected.
That might seem like a radical act, and in lots of ways it is, but it opens the door to some decidedly un-radical but richly wonderful old-fashioned things like falling in love, finding your heart and your self and emerging into the sunlight of new things ready to dance joyfully to whatever lies before you.