When did Suraj Sharma, the Ang Lee young man, stop shining?

Suraj Sharma was once the Ang Lee Young Man: Remember  Life Of Pi  ? The entire film revolved around Suraj’s  character. Suraj Sharma played the shipwrecked hero with a refreshing absence of visible craft. The angst came from a heart that knew no craft. This is the only performance that worked completely for me in Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi.  Irrfan Khan as the grownup Pi failed to convince me that he really cared about his character. Maybe we expected too much from him. As for the sublime Tabu , she had virtually nothing to do in the film and she does it nonchalantly.

The Life Of Pi was Suraj’s show all the way, and I saw a  great future ahead for him. For  a long time afterwards, I saw Suraj doing nothing worth talking about except Danish Renzu’s The Illegal, which cast Suraj as Hassan, an immigrant from Daryaganj in Delhi, chasing the American Dream.

I had spoken to Suraj after the release of The Illegal, and he was hopeful the future of Asian actors in world cinema. He felt there are better roles for people of colour. “Their stories and perspective shape the roles the actors get to play. This space is becoming more and more honest. This space is becoming more and more honest and wholesome, which is a great and healthy sign for the industry and the people.”

Just a year after The Ilegal, all hopes for Suraj and Asian young actors abroad are dashed to the ground with Netflix’s new rom-com Wedding Season. A shabby, poorly written, atrociously enacted NRI   romance, it  gives an all-new definition to brain-dead entertainment.

It pains me to see Suraj playing the stereotypical diasporic dude with a heavy chip on his shoulder. Joining him is Pallavi Sharda , whom some of us have not forgotten for her failed attempts to make it in Hindi cinema with cold turkeys like Besharam and Hawaizaada (the former with Ranbir Kapoor in which Pallavi replaced Taapsee Pannu). Pallavi returned to her home in Australia and nothing more was heard of her until now.

Wedding Season is a comeback that Pallavi Sharda should have avoided at any cost. Directed by Tom Dey (like they say, the morning shows the Dey), this is the kind of tacky, unimaginative ‘Bawlleewood’ film that independent producers in America throw their extra money into, hoping that the NRI audiences would like to see themselves in the pedestrian plot.

So Asha (Pallavi Sharda) is a 30-plus single Indian girl in New Jersey whose mother (Veena Sood) is paranoid about  her marriage. Or rather her non-marriage. Asha’s mom, with some cheerful support from her husband (Rizwan Manji), sets up Asha (pronounced Eh-sha) with Raaaweee (Ravi). Their first date had dialogues that seem hijacked  from TikTok videos. And sorry, it gets only worse from there.

The screenwriter Shiwani Shrivastava has been instructed to curry-favour the diasporic community with loads of  ‘NRI’ culture. The background music and ‘Bollywood’ songs sound like a misfired jamming session between Pritam and Himesh Reshammiya. The actors look either uncertain or unmoored, or a combination of both, depending on which side of their bed they woke up from on each shooting day.

Interestingly, Asha is shown as a strong-willed woman of the world (the queen of startups, no less). But she still needs Ravi to be her “pretend date” to fob off unwanted marriage proposals. How about a pretend-up standing  ovation for this sham flick? The meddlesome Auntyjis, who play corny Cupids, seem to be local NRIs who have been told to come on the sets in their  nice Kanjeevaram sarees to  play Auntyjis in  nice Kanjeevaram sarees.

Not one joke falls in place. Nor one character seems anything but a diasporic caricature. I only liked Nick, Asha’s sister’s American fiancé, played by Sean Kleier, a delightful, jovial outsider, trying to ‘belong’ to the Indian family. The rest of the characters suffer from the lack of  any intrinsic worth beyond behaving like barely-bearable buffoons that belong in a zoo. In a cage next to the dinosaur.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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