A Rating for a Suitable Boy: Ishaan Khatter and Taboos Forbidden...

The BBC’s A Suitable Boy, available on Netflix, satisfies the craving you’ve had for more episodes of Indian matchmaking, reducing Vikram Seth’s sprawling saga to a flat family drama. It’s entertaining but inelegant; ambitious in scope but not in ideas.

Many things have changed in the more than seven decades since India’s independence, but the determined determination of Indian mothers to marry their daughters does not seem to be one of them.

Watch the trailer for A Suitable Boy here

A Suitable Boy is set in a fictional town called Brahmpur against the backdrop of a new independent India and juggles more storylines than six episodes can frankly handle. It had to be more patient with certain topics and less forgiving of others. Customizations like these are seldom successful because they put pressure on them to address every element of the source material when, ideally, they should have grappled with the guilt of throwing the excess baggage away.

While Rupa Mehra’s search for a suitable daughter for her daughter Lata may be granted immunity, as the plot gives the narrative its title, other storylines – one, for example, a trip to a village and another an adulterous relationship – had nothing to do with it do the final cut.

Much of the supporting cast is wasted with clunky dialog and minimal screen time. Some of the best (male) actors in the country – Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, Vijay Raaz – are used for two-bit parts. Randeep Hooda stops by for a sex scene or two. Surely that can’t be all he was hired to do? It’s really amazing – almost as if director Mira Nair was obsessed with the ghost of Terrence Malick, who cut Adrien Brody’s lead role in The Thin Red Line without bothering to tell him.

Ishaan Khatter as Maan Kapoor and Shubham Saraf as Firoz Ali Khan in a statue by A Suitable Boy. (BBC / viewpoint)

Already in the first scenes it becomes clear that A Suitable Boy is aimed at a western audience, as a window into an exotic culture. Most of it is in English, with minor subtitles in Hindi and Urdu. In all honesty, it’s an extremely impressive viewing experience. White people wouldn’t care, but it’s irritating to see two villagers talking in English. I wish Nair, series writer Andrew Davies, and the BBC had been bolder and simply tuned the entire show in languages ​​appropriate to the environment and the time. But maybe they used earlier adaptations of novels like War & Peace and Les Miserables – both written by Davies – as templates?

This approach makes it difficult for actors who have been given the extra job of pacifying an audience that is already struggling to expose their disbelief. Not all of them are successful.

However, the usual suspects are responsible for navigating the majestic sets and stripping off the elaborate costumes to find a beating heart. As the seductive courtesan Saeeda Bai, taboo is magnetic as ever. She is the only one in a line-up of certainly more than 100 actors who makes the exchange in English palatable.

She shares most of her scenes with the very talented Ishaan Khatter, who plays Maan Kapoor, the headstrong son of a local politician. Maan’s arc reminded me, as someone who never had the courage to read Seth’s 1,500-page novel, of Michael Corleone’s development in The Godfather, including a brief visit to the country. It’s still very early, but Khatter has the uniquely Star quality, polished and robust playing – a market apparently cornered by Ranveer Singh. His scenes with taboo have a slight charm, a touch of shame in the eyes when he is emasculated by his father, and a visible anger when he finally finds his calling.

Newcomer Tanya Maniktala in a still of A Suitable Boy.

But it’s newcomer Tanya Maniktala who shows up as the lucky Lata – she has men to line up for her – as the heart and soul of the series, though on certain occasions I almost expected her to roll her big eyes at the lines she’s was given. She is positively adorable, and her rom-com-inspired arc is relatively more laid back than Maan’s, which occasionally leads to political territory. More on that in a minute.

Lata’s hunt for a husband is limited to three men – the Rakish Kabir Durrani (Danesh Razvi), the pragmatic Haresh Khanna (Namit Das) and the intellectual Amit Chatterji (Mikhail Sen). I describe them with individual adjectives because unfortunately that was reduced to each of them in Davies’ script. However, that is particularly successful in adding dimension to Haresh, an adorable man who takes her to a tannery on his first date with Lata. He’s a shoemaker, you see?

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The show is more successful at portraying the personal than the political. All of this – Lata’s chase for a man and Maan’s chase for a purpose – unfolds against the backdrop of a young nation struggling to discover its own identity. The seeds of secularism that were planted by our founding fathers did not grow into weeds of communal disharmony until years later. But a suitable boy addresses these sensitive subjects with a repulsive sweetness. Most controversial, especially for a story alluding to the demolition of Babri Masjid – the novel was published in 1993, a year after the mosque of Kar Sevaks was demolished – he appears to adopt the “move on” attitude.

“The crown in brown” describes Nair again and again a suitable boy for everyone who is within earshot. That’s enough. ‘Downton Bhaji’ would have been more accurate.

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