a suitable boy review

A Suitable Boy is set in a newly post-independence, post-partition India. It was published in 1993, when the west seemed to wake up to India’s great literary tradition. This adaptation of Vikram Seth’s epic, 1300-page novel seemed promising, but we’ll have to keep waiting for an Indian family saga of rugged verisimilitude, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. (Then Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram came out and was obsessed over by white crusties on their gap years, so it all went sour.) Title: A Suitable Boy (2020– ) 5.9 /10. Amid this long year of isolation, such an aesthetic signature practically qualifies as a superpower. You might have thought the BBC wouldn’t attempt any feats of precis more audacious than squeezing Eleanor Catton’s 850-page monster into six hours, but it turns out that was just a warm-up. A Suitable Boy has to run to keep up. Close on the tail of The Luminaries comes another six-part, Sunday night adaptation of a Big Novel. The production values are high, the performances poised and the locations stunning, from the dusty markets of Calcutta to the fictional university town of Brahmpur. “I don’t think I ever want to get married,” says Lata, to the horror of Rupa, who wastes no time in enlisting the rest of the family to pair off this maverick. 'A Suitable Boy' review: If only it had been in a suitable language. Read 29 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Channel 4’s Indian Summers in 2015 was glossy but slight. A Suitable Boy review: Forbidden romance holds up a mirror to the Indian Partition. A Suitable Boy review round-up: Mira Nair's BBC drama series feels 'uncomfortably old school' A Suitable Boy, adapted for screen by Andrew Davies, will soon release in India on Netflix. It does not get more Pride and Prejudice than a girl being chivvied into marriage by her mum. ‘A Suitable Boy’ is set in 1951, in a fictional town in North India, that is still trying to grapple with the aftermath of partition and the ever-simmering undercurrent of religious tensions. It’s clear that Rupa and Lata’s ideas of suitability will diverge, and it’s not long before the younger woman meets Kabir Durrani (Danesh Razvi), a fellow student who approaches her in the library. It deserved at least 12 episodes. It’s a richly composed series whose beats are recognizable and perhaps a bit fantastical, but nevertheless delivers a … The love affairs take place against the backdrop of simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions, four years after partition. Nair has jokily called A Suitable Boy “The Crown in brown”. By the end of episode one, Lata (played by the newcomer Tanya Maniktala) has met a thoroughly unsuitable boy: a Muslim. In this strange year, escaping to a made-up place will suit plenty of viewers just fine. The production design by Stephanie Carroll and the costumes by Arjun Bhasin accentuate the sense of place and period. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. When “A Suitable Boy” was published in 1993, the 1,349-page tome about post-Independence India, written by Vikram Seth, became one of the longest English-language novels in print. A Suitable Boy Review: A still from the series. Amit Chatterji (Mikhail Sen), Lata Mehra (Tanya Maniktala) and Haresh Khanna (Namit Das) in A Suitable Boy. Lata is … critic's rating: 3.0/5. Could anything on such challenging terms? And Davies, who would find an elegant way in adapting the dictionary to reduce it to its dirty words, is masterly at weaving the small thread into the big picture. With 'A Suitable Boy,' Mira and Nair and Andrew Davies adapt Vikram Seth's 1993 intergenerational saga set during the period after the Partition of India. A brief interaction that says so much about colonialism, 50s India, patriarchy and Lata herself. Many reviewers have also commented about how this is a sprawling family drama, which almost doesn't do justice to the way you, the reader, infiltrate these characters' lives, and that you learn an awful lot about Indian history. A Suitable Boy review: An astonishing cast, led by Ishaan Khatter, Tabu and Tanya Maniktala, struggles to make the most of minimal screentime and a … In the BBC's A Suitable Boy, the pious, stubborn insistence on getting children married off feels caricatured and two-dimensional, as do other characters’ oppositions to it. It is just that in the midst of our cultural reckoning, the old ways are starting to look downright weird. Perhaps this quality appeals to TV producers. 28 Oct 2020: 'A Suitable Boy' review: An unsuitable adaptation . A Suitable Boy Review: Mira Nair takes you back to the post-independence period with the story of Vikram Seth's drama-crammed novel of the same … Indian period drama has had a mixed recent history on British TV. Where, A Suitable Boy presents an orange-filtered fantasy version of India, Booking.com discount code: 10% with Level 1 Genius membership, Use this Debenhams discount and save up to 70% on men's lines - Spring offer, Up to 30% discount with garden offers at Ideal World, Receive a £2 AliExpress promo code with the official App, Argos kids: 25% off PAW Patrol toys, baby & nursery items. But I will come back to that. A Suitable Boy review: The Mira Nair series is worth your time The book has enough time and more to get into long, languid, eloquent descriptions of locations, characters, situations; in Mira Nair and Andrew Davies hands, the chop-chop eventually overcomes the choppiness, and becomes its … “You must help me to find a suitable boy for her,” she says, and we’re up and running. Suitable in nearly every way, you might think. Commenting has been disabled at this time but you can still. Except – and I guess this is the point – it would never have been made 20 years ago. On paper, A Suitable Boy is more promising. Most of A Suitable Boy seems pretty Bollywoodised and characters typified and charicaturised. In a positive note, Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV wrote "A Suitable Boy, does not miss a beat in funnelling a massive novel into an intricately stitched, necessarily pared filmed version. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. After all, Seth’s sprawling and deeply humane novel is one of the longest books in English. Sure enough, the first episode starts at a society wedding, where Savita Mehra (Rasika Dugal) is marrying a university lecturer, Pran Kapoor (Gagan Dev Riar). While they can’t resist the hoary old attractions of trains and temples – there’s even a Holi festival thrown in – they build a semi-plausible world with a clear story. No, not even one cantankerous dame protecting her fortune from her deathbed. Review. Channel 4’s, There’s one glaring exception, however, which is that the sole credited writer is, How To Build a Girl never quite matches up to the talents of its star, The Kissing Booth 2 isn’t as problematic as its predecessor, at least, Why ‘A Suitable Boy’ is a milestone for Asian representation, After the early exposition, understandable given the number of characters, the programme settles into its stride. For all its good intentions, this is still an orange-filtered fantasy version of India, where the characters speak English with the same mannered Indian accents and nobody can do anything without a sitar twanging. There is a lot to get through in the first episode. , it is more often admired from a safe distance than read. The less said about last year’s Beecham House on ITV, the better. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Love match. Great period drama speaks to the times. A Suitable Boy is a sprawling show, giving it the feel of a multigenerational series like Downton Abbey. The novel is very happy and consoling, but it is reluctant to commit itself, perhaps not to depth, but to exegesis. A Suitable Boy review – a very British, Indian period drama. You don't have to see this unless you are fond of the genre or the director or the location. A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, published in 1993. British creators struggle to get past all the tourist-board cliches and creaking colonial buildings. The same professor chiding Lata for choosing Joyce for her dissertation allows a free mingling and interchange of humor between girls and boys enacting a scene from Twelfth Night. “When India became independent in 1947, it was partitioned into two countries,” begins Andrew Davies’s staunchly traditional adaptation, which is directed by Mira Nair and was filmed on location in north India. ‘A Suitable Boy’: TV Review By Fionnuala Halligan 2020-08-07T12:48:00+01:00 Mira Nair joins forces with Andrew Davies to televise Vikram Seth’s novel set in India of the early 1950s. She can barely bring herself to go to a poetry reading with him, let alone risk her family’s censure. A Suitable Boy Critics Consensus. Naughty boy Maan (played by the Bollywood lead Ishaan Khatter) embarrasses his father, a high-ranking politician, by throwing the home minister into a fountain during Holi festival, then pursuing a ghazal singer, Saeeda, played by the legendary Indian actor Tabu. The director, Mira Nair, who has apparently wanted to film the book since its release, has assembled an almost exclusively Indian cast and crew. Luckily, the other main relationship is more promising. Indian period drama has had a mixed recent history on British TV. But in many ways Davies is the most suitable boy. A Suitable Boy book. Synopsis:1951. Where The Luminaries was gloomy and difficult to follow, A Suitable Boy is bright and comprehensible, thanks to Davies’ well trained eye for structure and Nair’s unobtrusive direction. Audience Reviews for A Suitable Boy: Season 1. In depicting the dangers of Hindu nationalism, the programme also nods towards modern Indian politics. Season 1 Review: A Suitable Boy arrives with a fresh perspective and charm to spare—even through some of its most difficult storylines. There is a lot riding on A Suitable Boy (BBC One), which is a fate that befalls pioneering and overdue series such as this. Some people were not happy with the choice of Davies – who is not just a white British writer, but the white British monarch of the period adaptation – to tell this vast story of newly independent India. Four large families, the birth of Hindu nationalism, an upcoming general election, the requisite music and dancing and first and foremost – this is India, and a Davies adaptation, after all – a wedding. The central theme by itself is non-political – of a mother trying to find her younger daughter a suitable groom, but the sub plots and characterizations are too politically shrill to ignore. ‘A Suitable Boy’ review: A lavish, if predictable offering from Mira Nair Mini Anthikad Chhibber October 23, 2020 13:05 IST Updated: October 24, 2020 13:15 IST Adapted from Vikram Seth's bestselling book, the first episode is a joy from start to finish. Their early flirtation is characterised by some unforgivably flat dialogue, as he says simpering things about books and reveals his devil-may-care attitude by sitting on a bench before she has asked him to. But The Crown is permitted to move at a stately pace. His presence is fair notice that we’ll have to keep waiting for an Indian family saga of rugged verisimilitude. We hope he’s not the only suitor. These are the oddities of the genre: no one spoke Russian in Davies’s War and Peace, either. ‘A Suitable Boy’: TV Review. It is beautiful, expensive and groundbreaking in its casting, yet Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s tome still feels uncomfortably old-school, Last modified on Mon 27 Jul 2020 22.02 BST. A Suitable Boy, interestingly, speaks more to the times in which it was written. Where The Luminaries was gloomy and difficult to follow, A Suitable Boy is bright and comprehensible, thanks to Davies’ well trained eye for structure and Nair’s unobtrusive direction. Viewers recognise the titles, but haven’t formed strong opinions on the contents. Does A Suitable Boy succeed? Filmfare. This may be the first Indian period drama of its kind in British TV history, but it remains an India that a British audience is used to seeing. The screenwriter of the serie- Andrew Davis, who has tried to cover 1359 pages of Vikram Seth’s 1993 novel A Suitable Boy in … Vikram Seth’s most famous novel A Suitable Boy came out in 1993. Lata’s brother in law, Maan Kapoor (Ishaan Katter), falls for a glamorous older singer, Saeeda Bai (Tabu), and there is a surprisingly creepy Oedipal edge to his pursuit. It is the BBC’s first period drama – in more than half a century of forays into the past in horse and carriage, from where you get a rather restricted view of history – with an entirely south Asian cast and no white characters. This panoramic portrait of a newly-free nation and fast-changing social segments within it has an easy-flowing quality that belies the sheer magnitude of the exercise." Jan 16, 2021. In newly independent India, passionate literature student Lata Mehra is torn between family duty and the promise of romance as three very different men try to win her heart. There’s one glaring exception, however, which is that the sole credited writer is Andrew Davies, the Viceroy of costume bonkbusters. Perhaps this quality appeals to TV producers. The novel follows four families during 18 months, and centres on Mrs. Rupa Mehra's efforts to arrange the marriage of her younger daughter, Lata, to a "suitable boy". Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. They are the real attractions and the biggest reason to binge on this adaptation. It was a different time, and in spirit and tone A Suitable Boy is like a period drama from then. With one daughter paired off, the bride’s widowed mother, Rupa (Mahira Kakkar), a clucking Mrs Bennett type, immediately turns her attention to her younger daughter, Lata (newcomer Tanya Maniktala), a 19-year-old university student who prefers arguing about Joyce to planning her own family. So when you hear the phrase A Suitable Boy, it’s not hard to imagine what it will entail. There’s dust in the air. “India was free, but the land and the people were divided for ever.” Succinct – and, appallingly, never more true than now. Like The Luminaries, it is more often admired from a safe distance than read. Use the HTML below. A temple is built next to a centuries-old mosque and the police open fire and kill peaceful protesters. So, this six-episode distillation of Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page panorama of post-partition India has to do everything, at once, in multiple territories. That is the power of this genre, one that my Indian family has gobbled up since my parents first fell for The Barchester Chronicles. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? With 'A Suitable Boy,' Mira Nair and Andrew Davies adapt Vikram Seth's 1993 intergenerational saga set during the period after the Partition of India. It was shot on location, so the buildings and landscapes at least look vaguely accurate. British creators struggle to get past all the tourist-board cliches and creaking colonial buildings. Screenplay. He is handsome, clever and has a wicked cover drive. It is a tall order, especially when some were unhappy with aspects of the adaptation before the opening credits rolled. Suddenly, everyone had a copy of A Suitable Boy, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things busting out of their bag. Aside from any other problems in the relationship, they have no discernible chemistry. Take the scene in which Lata argues with her English professor about why TS Eliot – “He’s American, isn’t he?” – is on the syllabus of “British Masters of the 20th Century”, but James Joyce is not. 4.5 stars: A Great Indian Novel in both scale and scope Those familiar with the unique dramatic phenomenon that are Hindi television soaps would see why many tend to bring them up in comparison with A Suitable Boy: both are interminably long and contend, prima facie, with the quintessentially Indian concept of arranged marriage. With 1,349 pages, the English–language book is one of the longest novels published in a single volume. Lata, a spirited university student, is preparing for her sister’s arranged marriage as her mother warns her that she, too, “will marry a boy I choose”. The cast mostly speaks English, with a smattering of Urdu and Hindi, and in India there has been some scoffing at the accents. Times Of India. English mingles with Urdu and Hindustani. A fine ensemble of actors keeps the momentum going even when A Suitable Boy is at its most monotonous. A Suitable Boy- Review Posted by itsmycopyright on October 31, 2020 Based on Vikram Seth’s most popular novel ‘A Suitable Boy’, this web series directed by celebrated director Mira Nair turned out to be an interesting adaptation. Viewers recognise the titles, but haven’t formed strong opinions on the contents. It’s refreshing to see Indian period drama grounded in a least a semblance of political reality. 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