The prize catch of the title isn’t precisely who you may count on in “A Nice Indian Boy,” a romantic comedy that brings a welcome queer angle to that substantial subgenre of affection tales twisted up in Indian social mores and cross-generational household politics. In lots of such movies, Naveen (Karan Soni) could be essentially the most fascinating of matches for a feminine protagonist: handsome, well-spoken and a working physician. That he’s homosexual places him within the much less historically masculine position of the one looking for a suitor; that his “good Indian boy” is in reality Jay (Jonathan Groff), a white man raised in Naveen’s tradition, is the extra complicating consider director Roshan Sethi‘s shiny, big-hearted if overly tidy third characteristic.
Nonetheless, Sethi and screenwriters Eric Randall — adapting a stage play by Madhuri Shekar — aren’t out to subvert each 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 Good Indian Boy” affords few structural surprises, hewing intently to a basic romcom template that for a very long time wasn’t accessible to queer characters — a lot much less queer characters of coloration. Certainly, the movie quite neatly lampshades its personal conventions by quoting immediately from Bollywood — particularly the ‘90s basic “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” — because it delivers its characters the cornball glad ending of their daydreams. For a sure viewers, this competition crowdpleaser (a SXSW premiere again in March) may set a equally aspirational bar.
The movie opens on the marriage of Naveen’s sensible, engaging older sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) to a good-looking, eminently approvable Indian man — a dream end result for the siblings’ loving however anxiously status-fixated immigrant mother and father, Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel), who had been themselves married by association again in India. Resisting invites to the dancefloor, Naveen wonders if he’ll ever be on the heart of such a ceremony. Although he’s out to his more-progressive-than-most household, he retains his private life firmly walled off from them, and so they’re not inclined to meddle the way in which they possible would had been he straight.
Little has modified when the movie skips forward a number of years. Single and predominantly concerned along with his job, Naveen feels his mother and father worth him lower than the married however nonetheless childless Arundhati. He finds an improbably excellent prospect, nevertheless, in charming photographer Jay, who’s not simply well mannered and respectful to a level no hawk-eyed mom may 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 adopted by now-deceased Indian mother and father as a baby — although at the same time as the 2 fall for one another, Naveen finds himself extra unnerved than reassured by their cultural commonalities.
As the connection turns some well beyond severe and towards the “meet-the-parents” stage, Naveen stays hesitant about collapsing that individual divide in his life. Randall’s script is most perceptive when analyzing its protagonist’s preconceptions, a lot of them misplaced, about his household: His mother and father, particularly his taciturn dad, will not be as old school and prejudiced as he believes, whereas Arundhati isn’t dwelling a conservative excellent of Indian marriage. As a examine of a middle-class Indian American household in an ongoing cultural transition between two international locations, “A Good Indian Boy” is gently humorous and fairly shifting — aided by Garg’s pretty, frazzled efficiency as an instinctively protecting mom ready to be let into her son’s life.
As a romance, it’s barely much less satisfying, largely as a result of Jay — performed with sometimes healthful heat by Groff — stays extra of an idea than a personality, negotiating this uncommon conflict of sensibilities (if not cultures, precisely) with such unflagging grace and maturity and, properly, niceness that he begins to appear a bit of too good to be true. We’re provided little sense of his life — domestically, professionally or socially — exterior what Naveen sees, and little of their very own routine as a pair past essential milestones and confrontations, although their chemistry is unforced and completely credible. Such omissions enable for pat resolutions to conflicts once they do come up: On this world, lengthy, thorny conversations could 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 Good Indian Boy” earns its clichés with sincerity and good humor — towards an ending that, with knowingly goofy choreography and the intensified jewel tones of Amy Vincent’s lensing, overrides cynicism within the method of any good marriage ceremony. “I feel we’re all embarrassed by the bigness of affection,” Jay says Naveen on their very first date, and Naveen actually is. “A Good Indian Boy” will not be, nevertheless, which is strictly the way it wins us over.
