A suitable boy
Cast: Taniya Maniktala, Ishaan Khatter, Tabu, Ram Kapoor, Mahira Kakkar
Director: Mira Nairo
If you were to ask me to pick one outstanding feature of Vikram Seth’s book, I’d say it has a strong sense of justice. Something that hasn’t been translated in Mira Nair’s show. However, it has an exceptional level of cinematography and a great ensemble.
Mehra (Mahira Kakkar) worries about the perfect candidate for her college daughter Lata (Taniya Maniktala), who would soon be torn between three suitable candidates. The three boys come from different backgrounds: first, an elite poet from Kolkata, second, a cricketer-cum-intellectual fellow Muslim student, and third, a working-class hero with moist eyes and a vision of good shoes.
There is another song with a minister’s son Maan (Ishaan Khatter) and an elderly ‘tawaif’ Saeeda (Tabu). They have reasons to fall in and out of love often. Somehow they take center stage and stay there longer than Lata and her quest for the flawless mate. For a regular Netflix viewer, the 1,300-page book may not be the point of reference, and you can’t exactly blame him for not seeing Lata as the real narrator. Also because Maan and Saeeda show much more intensity than at least half a dozen other pairs.
To be fair, the one-way characters lack dramatic arcs that Indian viewers expect in a love story, tragic or happy. None of the main characters really stand out as the ones with a solid purpose of making us take them with a little more seriousness than just a cursory mention of Joyce and some vague lines about the Ganges and its impact on your psyche.
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While the book is also a sharp commentary on the Congress Party’s handling of India’s nascent independence and its ephemeral social fabric and communal tensions, the show pushes every potentially relevant question into the background and never lets them come to the fore.
Strangely enough, Meenakshi (Shahana Goswami) of the City of Joy is the only character who makes some space for himself among the colonial-era buildings, promiscuous and borderline vulgar but very sincere. Her exuberance touches the audience and her intimate scenes with Randeep Hooda have a light-hearted atmosphere.
The same goes for Ram Kapoor. Even without his maliciously charming smile, he manages to impress with his understanding of space and movement. He comes across as a misunderstood visionary defeated in his own field.
But all said and done, Nair’s 6-episode miniseries fails to impress and that hurts because it’s Nair, the master of great storytelling.
Rating: 2.5/5
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