‘A Suitable Boy’ is a magnificent melodrama

How does a filmmaker, no matter how gloriously skillful, compress an epic novel into  the cinematic format  without  losing the flavour of the original source-material?  Deepa Mehta tried and failed with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Mira Nair scores a resounding success with Vikram Seth’s beloved 1993 novel  about  a young pretty educated  girl Lata Mehra (debutante Tanya  Maniktala) ’s search for  a bridegroom in 1951 when India  was still recovering from its recent amputation.

Seth’s  glorious novel and now the befitting screen version choose not to centralize  the  political upheavals of those times. Instead  A  Suitable Boy is  dizzily buoyant and  brimming with a  joie de vivre as it weaves in and  out of lives  from two related upper middleclass families, the Mehras and the  Kapoors both privileged and aware of it.

Be warned. If  you haven’t read the novel(and who hasn’t!) you will find it excruciating to figure out who’s who. By the time you do, the series, spinning a web of romantic anecdotes in a world of rapidly-changing  morals and politics, is over.

How I wished it would go on a bit longer! At the end of the last episode Lata finds her match. I wanted  to know how well her marriage works, how much of  her doubts and certainties  about  marital  equations were  proven  to be right.  Mira Nair adroitly pulls us into Lata’s life: her overbearing family, her best friend and of course her three suitors Kabir(Danesh Razvi), Amit (Mikhail Sen) and Haresh(Namit Das).

Each  of  the three wannabe husbands is played by actors who look supremely  comfortable in their parts, but Namit Das is specially engaging as  a smalltown humble sincere shoemaker with  ambitions of marrying  above himself.It  is  an emphatically empathetic character in a series teeming with enough  characters to populate  a small  village. They all seem far removed in their clothes,  moral  preferences, etc from  the world we know . In fact Lata’s mother Rupa(Mahira Kakkar) is hysterical in her emotional extravagance.

The heightened emotions of  a culture  grappling with a statehood that  straddles them between their Indianness and lately banished Britishness, are  brilliantly contoured in Mira Nair’s  sumptuous character studies .Each character, big or small , is  wonderfully well-sketched. A large part  of the warmth that they exude, even when  portraying a moral reprehensibility (Lata’s elder brother played by Vivek Gomber is a pompous ass,Lata’s sister-in-law played by Shahana Goswami is  a horny bitch) comes from the  actors who are so …so…Vikram Seth and  yet so  Mira Nair!

My problems as an audience were with  the  other family, the Kapoors.Although their politics and  sexual politics are  finely enmeshed  in the  plot(and yes, Andrew Davies has  done an exemplary job of  adapting Vikram Seth’s lurching lilting epic novel) the  pivotal part of Saeeda Bai, the tawaif who holds the key to the  Kapoor family’s near-ruination is  played by the  incomparable Tabu with less passion than  expected.

I am afraid Tabu has not done with her role what is expected  from her. Her Saeeda Bai  comes across as jaded, and  that’s not just the  character’s  personality. It’s more to do  with this  super actresss’ inability  to cross  from competence into the realm of resplendence as  she  usually does. Even when she lip-syncs those raw guttural  Ghazals she doesn’t quite get the sur right.

Ishaan Khattar as  the scandalous heir of  the Kapoor family and Saeeda Bai’s paramour hits all the right notes. His Maan Singh is  young, callow, passionate, earnest and  idealistic  . And though  sizzles in  his  frantic intimacy with  Tabu, I saw more chemistry in Khattar’s scenes with his screen-father Ram Kapoor(brilliant) and his Muslim best friend Firoz (Shubham Saraf).

Though  the splendid  series scores steeply in period details (the 1944  hit song Do naina matware tihare and the 1950 song  O gore  gore banke chore  figure prominently) it is the inter-personal relationships that  finally hold together Mira’s magnificent ode to  that long-gone  mood of heightened  romance which navigated  the lives of the well-to-do  after the birth of  a new nation. Even in a sequence such as  the one where   the  pregnant Savita (Rasika Duggal,as usual a natural) discusses  suitors, marriages pregnancy and periods with  her inexperienced sister Lata, the  emotions are relatable, yet heightened.

Lavishly  mounted but never unduly embellished with props or A Suitable Boy is a suitable tribute to  that era post Independence when a certain section of Indians was  not sure how British it  should remain. The cultural uncertainties  of the times render themselves ably to  a plot that is so  confidently conventional as to seem just the  opposite. By the time Lata rushes to the station to  stop her love from leaving, we  realize  how compelling romantic clichés can be in the right hands.