Without spoiling anything, Dandelion has to find the creative courage within herself. Casey may have helped light the match for her fire to burn, but the brilliant screenwriting element of the back half of this movie is that Riegel never lets it become just another story of how a woman needs a man to inspire her. When Dandelion finally reaches a song that feels like it’s truly, finally, expressing her voice, it’s one of the most moving moments you’ll see in a film this year.
One doesn’t need press notes to sense that Roshan Sethi’s “A Nice Indian Boy” is personal for its creator too. A lot of films at SXSW this year felt like political statements, but Sethi’s film feels more like a call of kindness in this world. It is a remarkably sweet film, the kind of nice comedy that feels increasingly hard to make well in a landscape when so many films come with cynical agendas. It is sometimes disappointingly sitcom-ish in its structure and visuals, but the amount of love that Sethi and writer Eric Randall (working from a play by Madhuri Shkar) have for these characters is obvious and contagious. You’ll grow to love them too.
Naveen (a gentle and genuine Karan Soni) is a doctor who struggles to meet the right guy. He’s tired of going to Indian weddings while being nowhere near scheduling his own. His sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) is married, which has made his parents Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel) very happy. Naveen meets a photographer named Jay (Jonathan Groff), who seems almost like his opposite in terms of personality, but the extrovert and the introvert find love, and eventually Naveen gets the wedding of his dreams.
That’s about it. And that’s all it needs to be. There’s a simple sweetness to “A Nice Indian Boy” that’s charming, largely due to the fact that everyone involved seems to be on the same page. Groff is always a welcome presence in just about anything, and the typically supporting Soni proves he can carry a film. Even the parent roles that usually come off as two-dimensional feel different in Garg and Patel’s hands. The fact that Naveen’s parents put on Out TV in an effort to understand their son could fit on a network sitcom, but the team here somehow makes it work. It’s because this is a film that deeply loves its characters, and while I think there’s a version that takes a few more risks and has a bit more visual confidence, it’s impossible to deny that this film lives up to its title by simply being so very “nice.”
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