Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff star in Roshan Sethi's queer love story between a reserved Indian-American doctor and a white photographer who unexpectedly share a culture.
The title gem isn't exactly who you'd expect in "A Nice Indian Boy," a romantic comedy that brings a welcome queer perspective to that substantial subgenre of love stories entangled in Indian social mores and intergenerational family politics. In many films of this ilk, Naveen (Karan Soni) would be the ideal match for a female lead: handsome, articulate, and a practicing physician. His homosexuality casts him in the less traditionally masculine role of the man seeking a suitor; that his "nice Indian boy" is actually Jay (Jonathan Groff), a white man raised in Naveen's culture, is the most complicating factor in director Roshan Sethi's brilliant and generous, if overly tidy, third feature.
Director: Roshan Sethi
Writers: Eric Randall, Madhuri Shekar
Stars: Karan Soni, Jonathan Groff, Sunita Mani
Still, Sethi and screenwriter Eric Randall—adapting a play by Madhuri Shekar—don't set out to subvert every cliché and tradition in the book. From their chance meeting in a Hindu temple to their easily resolved second-act breakup to their climactic, colorful wedding dance, "A Nice Indian Boy" offers few structural surprises, heeding faithfully to a classic rom-com template long unavailable to queer characters, let alone queer characters of color.
Indeed, the film, quite skillfully, parodies its own conventions by directly quoting Bollywood—specifically, the '90s classic "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"—in giving its characters the sappy happy ending of their daydreams. For certain audiences, this festival hit (which premiered at SXSW in March) might set a similar standard. The film opens with the wedding of Arundhathi (Sunita Mani), Naveen's intelligent and attractive older sister, to a handsome and eminently likable Indian man—a dream outcome for Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel), their loving but status-obsessed immigrant parents, who were married by arrangement in India. Resisting invitations to the dance floor, Naveen wonders if he'll ever be the center of attention at such a ceremony. Although he has come out as gay to his more progressive-than-most family, he keeps his private life firmly isolated from them, and they are unwilling to pry as they likely would if he were heterosexual.
Little has changed as the film jumps forward a few years. Single and primarily dedicated to his work, Naveen feels his parents value him less than Arundhathi, who is married but still childless. However, he finds an ideal prospect in the charming photographer Jay, who is not only polite and respectful to a degree no naive mother could fault, but a devoutly practicing Hindu with a tattoo of the god Ganesh on his shoulder and a sentimental fondness for Bollywood movies. It turns out he was adopted as a child by deceased Indian parents; though even as the two fall in love, Naveen is more bewildered than reassured by their commonalities.
As their relationship moves beyond seriousness and approaches the "meet the parents" stage, Naveen hesitates to break that barrier in his life. Randall's script is more insightful in examining its protagonist's preconceived ideas, many of them mistaken, about his family: his parents, especially his taciturn father, may not be as old-fashioned and prejudiced as he believes, while Arundhati doesn't live up to a conservative ideal of Indian marriage. As a study of a middle-class Indian-American family in a continuing cultural transition between two countries, "A Nice Indian Boy" is gently funny and quite touching, aided by Garg's charming yet intense performance as an instinctively protective mother waiting to enter her son's life.
As a romance, it's a little less satisfying, largely because Jay—played by Groff with his usual sincere warmth—remains more a concept than a character, navigating this unusual clash of sensibilities (if not cultures, exactly) with an unfailing grace, maturity, and, well, kindness that begins to seem too good to be true. We're offered little insight into their life—domestic, professional, or social—beyond what Naveen sees, and little of their own routine as a couple beyond crucial milestones and confrontations, though their chemistry is spontaneous and entirely believable. Such omissions allow for easy solutions to conflicts when they arise: in this world, long and thorny conversations can be circumvented with a reenactment of a musical number from "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" or a shared culinary tip.
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