An Interesting Queer Romantic Comedy

The prize catch of the name isn’t precisely who you could be expecting in “A Great Indian Boy,” a romantic comedy that brings a welcome queer attitude to that really extensive subgenre of affection tales knotted up in Indian social mores and cross-generational circle of relatives politics. In lots of such motion pictures, Naveen (Karan Soni) will be the maximum fascinating of suits for a feminine protagonist: handsome, well-spoken and a running physician. That he’s homosexual places him within the much less historically masculine position of the only in the hunt for a suitor; that his “great Indian boy” is in reality Jay (Jonathan Groff), a white guy raised in Naveen’s tradition, is the extra complicating think about director Roshan Sethi‘s shiny, big-hearted if overly tidy 3rd characteristic.

Nonetheless, Sethi and screenwriters Eric Randall — adapting a level play via Madhuri Shekar — aren’t out to subvert each and every trope and custom within the e book. From its meet-cute in a Hindu temple to its simply resolved second-act breakup to its culminating, colourful marriage ceremony dance, “A Great Indian Boy” provides few structural surprises, hewing carefully to a vintage romcom template that for a very long time wasn’t to be had to queer characters — a lot much less queer characters of colour. Certainly, the movie somewhat well lampshades its personal conventions via quoting without delay from Bollywood — particularly the ‘90s vintage “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” — because it delivers its characters the cornball glad finishing in their daydreams. For a undeniable target audience, this pageant crowdpleaser (a SXSW premiere again in March) would possibly set a in a similar way aspirational bar.

The movie opens at the marriage ceremony of Naveen’s good, sexy older sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) to a good-looking, eminently approvable Indian guy — a dream result for the siblings’ loving however anxiously status-fixated immigrant dad and mom, Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel), who have been themselves married via association again in India. Resisting invites to the dancefloor, Naveen wonders if he’ll ever be on the middle of the sort of rite. Although he’s out to his more-progressive-than-most circle of relatives, he assists in keeping his non-public existence firmly walled off from them, they usually’re no longer prone to meddle the way in which they most likely would have been he instantly.  

Little has modified when the movie skips forward a couple of years. Unmarried and predominantly concerned together with his activity, Naveen feels his dad and mom price him not up to the married however nonetheless childless Arundhati. He reveals an improbably best prospect, then again, in fascinating photographer Jay, who’s no longer simply well mannered and respectful to some extent no hawk-eyed mom may just fault, however a devoutly training Hindu with a tattoo of the god Ganesh on his shoulder and a soppy penchant for Bollywood films. Seems he was once followed via now-deceased Indian dad and mom as a kid — even though at the same time as the 2 fall for each and every different, Naveen reveals himself extra unnerved than reassured via their cultural commonalities.

As the connection turns some well past severe and towards the “meet-the-parents” level, Naveen stays hesitant about collapsing that specific divide in his existence. Randall’s script is maximum perceptive when analyzing its protagonist’s preconceptions, lots of them out of place, about his circle of relatives: His dad and mom, particularly his taciturn dad, will not be as outdated and prejudiced as he believes, whilst Arundhati isn’t dwelling a conservative best of Indian marriage. As a find out about of a middle-class Indian American circle of relatives in an ongoing cultural transition between two international locations, “A Great Indian Boy” is gently humorous and slightly transferring — aided via Garg’s beautiful, frazzled efficiency as an instinctively protecting mom ready to be let into her son’s existence.

As a romance, it’s rather much less pleasing, largely as a result of Jay — performed with generally healthy heat via Groff — stays extra of an idea than a personality, negotiating this peculiar conflict of sensibilities (if no longer cultures, precisely) with such unflagging grace and adulthood and, effectively, niceness that he starts to look a little bit too nice to be true. We’re introduced little sense of his existence — locally, professionally or socially — outdoor what Naveen sees, and little of their very own regimen as a pair past important milestones and confrontations, even though their chemistry is unforced and completely credible. Such omissions permit for pat resolutions to conflicts once they do get up: On this global, lengthy, thorny conversations will also be elided with a restaged musical quantity from “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or a shared cookery tip within the kitchen.  

However such is the shorthand of the mainstream romantic comedy, and “A Great Indian Boy” earns its clichés with sincerity and nice humor — towards an finishing that, with knowingly goofy choreography and the intensified jewel tones of Amy Vincent’s lensing, overrides cynicism within the method of any nice marriage ceremony. “I believe we’re all embarrassed via the bigness of affection,” Jay says Naveen on their first actual date, and Naveen definitely is. “A Great Indian Boy” isn’t, then again, which is precisely the way it wins us over.