SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
At the start of the new film, "A Nice Indian Boy," Naveen, while attending his sister's big Indian wedding, wonders if he'll ever have one, too. To be fair, he just hasn't met Mr. Right. That's until he sees Jay Kurundkar at his local Hindu temple. Jay is tall, lanky and white, and he loves to sing Bollywood songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A NICE INDIAN BOY")
JONATHAN GROFF: (As Jay Kurundkar, singing in non-English language). And then it's, (vocalizing). That was a little over the top. Sorry, that happens.
KARAN SONI: (As Naveen Gavaskar) No, that's OK.
SIMON: Jay was adopted by an older Indian couple. He speaks Hindi. He prays to Ganesh. And, in many ways, is more Indian than Naveen. In fact, Jay is the first to confess that he'd love a big Bollywood wedding. Roshan Sethi is the director of "A Nice Indian Boy," and he says Naveen is both terrified and drawn to being out with his emotions.
ROSHAN SETHI: He increasingly opens up inevitably over the course of the movie, forcing him to bring someone home to his parents, which is the one thing he has avoided because he's sort of theoretically gay, but not practically gay, at least with his family.
SIMON: Help us understand what that means.
SETHI: Well, the - it's - there's a difference that I've experienced myself personally between being out to your family and being gay in theory and concept.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A NICE INDIAN BOY")
SONI: (As Naveen Gavaskar) They obviously know I'm gay. They've just never seen me be gay with another gay.
SETHI: But then when you bring someone home - and this is probably true for everyone, regardless of orientation - you're bringing the reality of your love and sort of the reality of who you are as well home. And that's what the movie largely deals with. So it is a rom-com in the sense that it follows their love story. But it devotes just as much time, if not more, to his reconciling his love with his family, which is a sort of very South Asian thing. You never love without the context of family.
For example, on the Western conception of love, it's a bit more individualistic. Take "Sex And The City," for example, where you never meet Carrie's parents. We don't even know if she has them. And they certainly don't meet her partners. That's never the case in South Asian movies, in Bollywood, in particular, where you are constantly negotiating family, even as you're negotiating love. One doesn't follow the other. They're both occurring concurrently. And that was all baked into the structure of the play, which eventually became the movie.
SIMON: One of the things that can affect you about the film is that it's not a - what we call a typical coming-out story because the parents aren't saying, we're shocked. Shocked. They're saying, how can we help? Tell us.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A NICE INDIAN BOY")
ZARNA GARG: (As Megha Gavaskar) Should we watch some out TV while we wait?
HARISH PATEL: (As Archit Gavaskar) Watching out TV is not going to help us.
SETHI: Yes, they are on the other side of the closet. So the movie isn't a coming-out story. And often queer stories are so based on trauma in the closet and coming out of it. This one occurs after it. They're still contending with their son's sexuality, but they're past the point of realizing that he is gay. And that I thought was really interesting. The thing about the movie that I love the most - which comes entirely from the play - is just that it has such a gentle and empathetic attitude towards the parents, who it is as interested in understanding as it is the kids.
SIMON: Let's present a few seconds from a scene where Naveen's parents, they're waiting to meet their son's boyfriend, and they made assumptions about him, didn't they?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A NICE INDIAN BOY")
PATEL: (As Archit Gavaskar) Naveen didn't tell us you were white.
GROFF: (As Jay Kurundkar) Really?
SONI: (As Naveen Gavaskar) Dad, do you - do you really think that's important?
GARG: (As Megha Gavaskar) Well, we think it's wonderful that you're white.
SONI: (As Naveen Gavaskar) Oh, my God.
SUNITA MANI: (As Arundhathi Gavaskar) Seriously?
SIMON: Help us understand Naveen's parents. They love their son. They want to do the right thing, don't they?
SETHI: Yes, and it actually came out of the playwright wondering how much her parents would care about her bringing home a white partner and if it would be different if she was a man and she was a gay man. So it came out of kind of a thought experiment. In a way, I think they're befuddled. There has obviously been a sort of cultural practice of encouraging Indians to marry other Indians. In part, it is a survival tactic for a population that immigrated from a completely different country to this one and is trying to preserve their culture and their traditions here. And in part just an old tribal instinct that's true of almost every culture.
But here, they're faced with a kind of dizzyingly confusing situation where they have, on one hand, their son bringing home another man. That man is white, but then he is Indian and maybe has more claim to be Indian than their own son in terms of his degree of cultural connection. So they're befuddled as we are. And part of the theory behind that from the original play by Madhuri Shekar was just to test all of these biases as much as possible.
SIMON: Naveen's boyfriend, fiancé, is a freelance photographer. To Naveen's parents, what does that really mean?
SETHI: (Laughter) Well, I think it's a terrifying profession to any immigrant parents because immigrants, when they come here, are very keen for their children to establish themselves in secure professions as a way again of securing their own survival. So I went to medical school, for example, and it was dominated by Indians, Asians and Nigerians. They all had one thing in common, which is that their parents were immigrants.
SIMON: Can I ask you about being a doctor? You're an oncologist, right?
SETHI: Yes, I'm a radiation oncologist, so I don't do chemotherapy. I do radiation, and I practice for only nine weeks of the year at Dana-Farber and Brigham in Boston, where I cover consults.
SIMON: May I ask how your parents feel about this filmmaker thing?
SETHI: Well, I don't think initially my mom was super keen on it because we were talking about immigration and survival, and entering the arts is certainly not a means of securing your family's survival for most people.
SIMON: (Laughter).
SETHI: But she has gradually, I think, really opened up and softened to it. You know, part of the reason I'm in the arts is because of my mother. She was a really big reader growing up. She made me read. We weren't actually allowed to watch anything, and as a result, I became originally a writer and then later found my way to directing.
SIMON: And how do you feel about your film being called a rom-com?
SETHI: I love rom-coms, and I think people need stories of love and uplift and joy and hope more than ever. So I'm more than happy for it to have that description. It is also a family movie in that it is about how romance fits into the family. But it is, above all, entertaining. And the only thing I resist are the descriptors like queer rom-com or Indian American rom-com, which to me seem to make the movie more niche than it is, and actually tested the highest among straight white women and suburban mothers. And I think we're all caught up these days in Hollywood about which movies are for which groups of people. And the truth is, we're all actually keenly interested in each other.
SIMON: Roshan Sethi directed the new film, "A Nice Indian Boy." The film is in theaters on April 4. Thank you so much for being with us.
SETHI: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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