The title prize isn’t exactly what you might expect in A Nice Indian Boy, a romantic comedy that brings a welcome quirky angle to this grand subgenre of love stories tangled in Indian social mores and family politics across generations. . In many of these films, Naveen (Karan Soni) would be the most desirable character for the female protagonist: good-looking, well-spoken and a working doctor. Being gay places him in the less traditionally masculine role of someone seeking a suitor; That his “nice Indian boy” is actually Jay (Jonathan Groff), a white man raised in Naveen culture, is the most complicating factor in director Roshan Sethi’s bright, big-hearted, if overly tidy, third film.
However, Sethi and screenwriters Eric Randall – who are adapting a play by Madhuri Shekhar – do not seek to subvert every trope and convention in the book. From the meet-cute at a Hindu temple to the easily resolved second breakup to the colorful wedding dance that climaxes, “A Nice Indian Boy” offers few structural surprises, sticking closely to a classic romantic template that has long fallen flat. Not available to queer characters – let alone colorful characters. In fact, the film elegantly highlights its own traditions by borrowing directly from Bollywood – specifically the 90s classic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – offering its characters the happy ending to their daydreams. For a certain audience, this crowd-pleaser (premiering at SXSW in March) may set a similarly ambitious bar.
The film begins with the wedding of Naveen’s intelligent and attractive elder sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) to an eminently handsome and agreeable Indian man – the result of a dream for the loving but status-obsessed immigrant parents, Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit. (Harish Patel) who got married by arrangement in India. Navin resists invitations to the dance floor, wondering if he would be at the heart of such a party. Although he is more open to his more progressive family than most, he keeps his personal life away from them, and do not tend to interfere in the way they likely would if he were straight.
Little changes when the film skips a few years. Naveen, who is single and involved in his job, often feels that his parents value him less than Arundhati, who is married but has no children. However, he finds an improbably perfect opportunity in the charming photographer Jay, who is not only polite and respectful to a degree that could be mistaken for a hawk-eyed mother, but a devoutly observant Hindu with a tattoo of the god Ganesh on his shoulder and a wet flair. For Bollywood movies. It turns out that he was adopted by deceased Indian parents when he was a child – and although they fall in love with each other, Naveen finds himself more stressed than reassured by their cultural commonalities.
As the relationship shifts somewhat beyond seriousness and toward the “meeting the parents” stage, Naveen remains hesitant about the collapse of this particular dichotomy in his life. Randall’s script is most perceptive when examining its protagonist’s preconceptions, many of which are misplaced, about his family: his parents, especially his taciturn father, may not be as old-fashioned and prejudiced as he thinks, while Arundhati does not live a conservative ideal. Of Indian marriage. As a study of a middle-class Indian American family in an ongoing cultural shift between two countries, “Nice Indian Boy” is gently funny and deeply moving — aided by Garg’s beautiful, awkward performance as an instinctive, sheltered mother waiting to be let in. Her son’s life.
As a romance, it’s somewhat less satisfying, largely because Jay – played with typically wholesome warmth – remains more a concept than a character, negotiating this unusual clash of sensibilities (if not cultures, specifically ) with such tireless grace, maturity and kindness that it begins to sound too good to be true. We’re offered little sense of his life — domestic, professional, or socially — outside of what Naveen sees, and little of their routine as a couple beyond crucial milestones and confrontations, though their chemistry is unforced and entirely believable. Such an omission allows conflicts to be settled when they arise: in this world, long, thorny conversations can be erased by a musical score from the movie “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or a cooking tip shared in the kitchen.
But that’s the shorthand of mainstream romantic comedies, and “Nice Indian Boy” redeems the clichés with sincerity and good-natured humor — toward an ending that transcends the film’s cynicism, with deliberately goofy choreography and intense jewel tones lensed by Amy Vincent. The way any good wedding should be. “I think we’re all embarrassed by the magnitude of love,” Jay told Naveen on their first date, and Naveen certainly was. However, A Nice Indian Boy is not that, and that is exactly how it attracts us.