Love across Cultures, with a Twist
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Published in: July-August 2025 issue.

A Nice Indian Boy
Directed by Roshan Sethi
Levantine Films

 

A NICE INDIAN BOY is an exuberant film as well as a touching celebration of unconventional romantic love defying expectations. Director Roshan Sethi’s film also touches upon issues of family loyalty, cultural misunderstanding, and intergenerational conflict.

            Naveen Gavaskar (played by Karan Soni) is a shy, introverted, gay doctor. He’s using dating apps with little luck. (One text reads: “Guess you’ve been eating an apple a day because you’ve kept this doctor away.”) His boisterous mother Megha, taciturn father Archit, and married but divorcing sister Arundhathi know and accept that he’s gay, but don’t quite know how to be supportive. He relies primarily on his fellow doctor and bestie Paul to kvetch and tell him the new rules of gay dating.

            While worshipping Ganesha (the Hindu god of new beginnings) at a temple, Naveen spots Jay Kurundkar (Jonathan Groff), a white man who grew up in foster care until he was adopted by two Indian parents, now dead. Jay appears the next day as the photographer taking ID pictures of all the hospital staff. They go on a cringy date, but Naveen is slowly charmed by Jay’s sincerity, brashness, and serenading romanticism. They fall in love, but Jay is upset: “Naveen didn’t tell his family about me, so it’s like I don’t exist.”

            Jay meets the Gavaskars, but it doesn’t go well. His parents weren’t expecting the boyfriend to be white and seem unmoved by the fact that Jay was raised by Indian parents and is fully acculturated into Hindu customs and beliefs. In his even-tempered demeanor, Jay seems more Hindu than the anxious Naveen. For his part, Naveen is caught between loyalty to his family and his life in the outside world. He and Jay have a fight, questioning everything about the relationship. Jay observes: “You’re almost apologizing for the inconvenience of existing.” Jay moves out of their flat. Can they reconcile? Much of the film focuses on Naveen’s family’s reaction to him and Jay as a couple.

Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff in A Nice Indian Boy.

            A Nice Indian Boy is basically an opposites-attract romance between the inhibited Naveen and the extroverted Jay: the dour realist versus the hopeless romantic. The fact that Jay’s character isn’t as richly developed as Naveen’s could be seen as a flaw, though in fairness this film is also about how an immigrant family adapts to American mores, especially when they clash directly with traditional Indian values.

     The film is enhanced by the palpable chemistry of the two lead actors, both of whom are openly gay. Groff captures Jay as a charming, confident, passionate young man who nevertheless conveys a sense of fragility related to his childhood trauma. Soni excels at revealing Naveen’s discomfort as he wrestles with repressed emotions and the need to deal with newly exposed truths within his family.

    The script by gay screenwriter Eric Randall (who happens to be planning a wedding with his own longtime boy-friend) is based on Madhuri Shekar’s play (same title) and manages to capture the contradictory feelings that result from clashes of two incompatible cultures, with the added twist that one of the partners may be “white” as a racial category but outdoes Naveen as a practitioner of Hindu folkways.

            In the press notes, Roshan Sethi confesses that his upcoming marriage (which his mother has opposed) is with Karan Soni, so we see how personally the film’s plot mirrors the creators of this romcom. It’s also obvious these are cherished characters who share a passion for Indian culture and Bollywood cinema. A Nice Indian Boy is a crowd-pleasing queer love story that’s both pleasant escape and a serious exploration of current issues.

 

Brian Bromberger is a freelance writer who works as a staff reporter and arts critic for The Bay Area Reporter.

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