Early on in A Nice Indian Boy, a new film which depicts the twists and turns of the hearts of an interracial, same-sex couple, Naveen (Karan Soni) and Jay (Johnathan Groff) go to the movies to catch a screening of the cult Hindi-language film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which is commonly referred to by fans as D.D.L.J. In one particular scene, the musical sequence for “Tujhe Dekha Toh,” the woman, clad in a white punjabi, suddenly hears the sound of a cowbell that stops her in her tracks, then a voice begins to serenade her: “When I saw you I knew, my beloved, love is a crazy thing.” She catches sight of him across the field: he’s wearing a black leather jacket; his arms open wide. As the strings soar, she dashes into his embrace.
“You know that’s what I love about D.D.L.J.,” Jay, who, though white, was adopted by Indian parents later in life and feels a sense of belonging within the culture, asks Naveen, a second-generation immigrant: “It doesn’t end with the couple getting together in the end like in an American movie. Because it’s not about two people going at it alone, clinging to each other like life rafts. It’s about everybody, together. The family, the wedding.” Despite feeling the same way, Naveen shrinks in the face of this unabashed articulation of desire, repressing his thoughts and feelings, for he is designed to keep everything bottled up inside: until the right moment.
“You never say what you feel,” Jay says during their first argument: “Said what you want.” The film, when it’s not trying to entertain the audience through its supposed witty, topical banter, is most effective when it develops Naveen’s relationship with his shame. “You move through public spaces like your existence is an inconvenience,” Jay astutely assesses: “And you’re very sorry to have caused anyone to notice you at all.” This fear of being seen continually pushes Naveen away from the people in his life, from the life he wants, from the person he is.
“There’s a difference between not wanting something and being afraid to want it,” he realizes later on, and it is that very tension that animates the best parts of this tame, saccharine film, which, when it doesn’t have love on its mind, turns its gaze towards its imperfect family, which include the parents, Archit (Harish Patel) and Megha Gavaskar (a delightful, scene-stealing Zarna Garg), whose marriage, long-ago arranged, seems to be fraying at the exhausted edges as their children carve out in their own distinct paths, and a sister. For Arundhathi (Sunita Mani), it is the decision to end her arranged marriage, to not bear the grandchildren her mother so desperately, and comically, wishes for, and to come to resent the pressure she felt she’d faced to get married, which only resurfaces when Naveen announces his unexpected engagement. “The expectations were clear,” she says—as are the film’s.
Directed by Roshan Sethi, and adapted from the play by Madhuri Shekar, A Nice Indian Boy, neatly divided into chapters that move things along at a brisk enough pace to risk becoming burdensome, never quite convinces you of the bond between the central pair, which is stripped of the sentimentality and melodrama that defines the strain of Bollywood it is indebted to, but it also never doesn’t do the work to create the stakes to make you wonder if, at the mid-point, they will remain together despite the various forces seemingly working to keep them apart. It makes sense, then, that this film was produced by the likes of Justin Baldoni, who made his name on the TV series Jane The Virgin, a remake of a Venezuelan telenovela, and executive produced by Mindy Kaling, whose series The Mindy Project was an homage to 90’s romcoms, two creators attracted to injecting foreign elements into familiar structures, subverting it just enough to alter the superficial elements but, inevitably, arriving at ever-predictable destinations.
A Nice Indian Boy has a dated, nostalgic sensibility about it, meaning it arrives absorbed by the shadow of its own influences, since marriage, after all, isn’t the only endpoint of a queer relationship; family is not necessarily the bonds you were born into; and true love can end without it being perceived as a failure. But there’s no room for the film to sing a song other than what has been sung before—in fact, one yearns for an original musical sequence—but here, within these narrative and thematic constraints, there’s only enough for a mere register change.
A Nice Indian Boy is now playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.