Funny Boy: Canuck Oscar Contender Charts Gay Coming-of-Age Story, Sri Lankan-Style

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The new movie Funny Boy (no relation to Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl) is Deepa Mehta’s latest, and adapted from Tamil-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 coming-of-age book.

The film is Canada’s nomination for the Academy Awards best international picture and, thanks to COVID-19, you don’t have to line up in the cold to see it in theatres. The film is available December 4 via CBC, either by television or the free app Gem just a week after a nominal limited theatrical release.

Selvadurai’s book was a series of six linked stories inspired by the model of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Collectively, they tell the story of an adolescent boy coming to terms with his homosexuality on the eve of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009).

Funny Boy has passed through the hands of several filmmakers over the years, including Mehta herself, who adapted it for a CBC radio play in 2006. Now Funny Boy has been acquired for Ava DuVernay’s company for worldwide theatrical release, and by Netflix for international streaming, which means it will have a lot of eyes on it in the months ahead.

The film has already drawn controversy, not for its sexual themes but became some Tamils in exile have objected to the casting of non-Tamil actors and inaccurate accents that required fixing in post-production dubbing. (For a detailed discussion, see NOW Magazine critic Radheyan Simonpillai’s roundtable in which Mehta and co-screenwriter Selvadurai respond to their critics.)

For most of the audience not from Sri Lanka, these issues aren’t detectable. What they’ll see instead is a well-intended and relatively traditional award season prestige history drama, focusing on themes of love and war and centred around the Colombo-based upper–middle class Chelvaratnam family.

Although Funny Boy isn’t a particularly long or complex book, it covers a lot of historic ground. At just under two hours, the film risks becoming a flipbook version of dramatic highlights. That issue is addressed, with some success, by the impressionistic visual style Mehta and cinematographer Douglas Koch have adopted, using canted handheld camera images and fleet editing to suggest the fragmentary flow of memory.

Various signposts place us in the tropical Sri Lankan location: the beach in the setting sun, the subdued, multi-coloured interiors, the raucous echo of a regional theatre, a faded passenger train, a scene at a fountain in front of grand Victorian-era mansion.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The opening scene, set in a tropical garden in Colombo, sees a line of babbling children running with palm fronds as part of a pretend wedding. We are in the mid-seventies, and an eight-year-old Arjie (Arush Nand) is playing his favourite game with his girlfriends: “Bride-bride,” with himself as the made-up, sari-wearing betrothed.

When the kids squabble, Arjie is exposed in full make-up to his parents: stern father Appa (Ali Kazmi) and liberal mother Amma (Nimmi Harasgama), an intriguing character who struggles with conflicting emotional and political loyalties. (One segment of the book, dealing with her conflict of the heart, has been excised from the film adaptation).

When one of the uncles remarks that Arjie might turn out “funny,” the boy’s father looks grim. His grandma puts him to work polishing brass ornaments, the better to work the gay out of him. Arjie soon finds an ally in his beautiful Canadian-educated aunt Radha (Agam Darshi), who wears jeans, sings Leonard Cohen songs, and promotes Arshi’s budding sexual orientation.

Radha gets him involved in her theatre class and teaches him to spin around and declare, “Don’t mess with the grand diva!” That line, which sounds a bit Billy Elliot-ish, is not in the book, and is in keeping with the film’s on-the-nose approach.

When Auntie Radha begins a prohibited relationship with a Sinhalese man, we notice that he has a Buddha figurine on the dashboard of his car (the Chelvaratnam clan have Christian crucifixes on their walls.)

But Radha becomes a cautionary example of taboo love. After Radha is assaulted on a train by an anti-Tamil mob, she surrenders to her family’s demands for an arranged marriage and leaves the country.

Flash forward to Arjie, now a sweetly handsome 17-year-old (Brandon Ingram) who bounces back. He finds himself at the posh Victoria boarding school (for all Arjie’s problems, money isn’t one) where the English teacher, conveniently, sets the tone by reading aloud the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

After Sinhalese students threaten him as an intruding Tamil, he falls, literally, into the arms of a charismatic fellow student who, though also Sinhalese, is more sympathetic. His new friend, Shehan (Rehan Mudannayake) has long wavy hair and genre-bending musical tastes, including the gay-positive lyrics of The Bronski Beat. Romance is fast, consummation in the family garage takes a little longer.

In parallel to the erotic awakening, we see the country’s simmering ethnic tension rise to the boiling point. The twin threads of the story – the gay coming-of-age story with the Tamil persecution – are linked by the threat of exposure, though in practice Arjie’s irrepressibility seems to work like an invulnerability shield.

For most of its running time, Funny Boy keeps the social violence at a distance, until with about 15 minutes to go, the film offers a montage of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots that launched the civil war, a frenzy of destruction accompanied by a dirge-like Howard Shore musical passage.

In a deviation from the book though, Funny Boy manages to find a hopeful final note, just before a final credit reports that a million Tamils were forced into exile by the war. The urge to find hope in tragedy is as inevitable as the one to recognize shapes in clouds. But Funny Boy leaves an unsettling chasm between this one slender story and the grim history it represents.

Funny Boy. Directed by Deepa Mehta. Written by Deepa Mehta and Shyam Selvadurai, based on the novel by Shyam Selvadurai. Starring Agam Darshi, Ali Kazimi, Brandon Ingram, Nimmi Harasgama, Ruvin De Silva.