Wednesday 1st December 2010

My Brother Nikhil

Set in Goa 1987 - 1994, this is a tear-jerker, a story of forbidden love and its social consequences.

In March 2005, a low-budget drama called "My Brother Nikhil" opened in cinemas across India, telling the story of a gay man's struggle with his family and his country after contracting the virus that causes AIDS.

Quietly, gently, "My Brother Nikhil" has tested the limits of the Indian cinemagoer's sensibility.

Commercially, it is no runaway Bollywood blockbuster; nor is it meant to be. Rather, its impact lies in having served up a story about love and loss - sentimental staples of contemporary Indian cinema - with a gay man at its centre, and having done so without kicking up the slightest fuss from India's cultural conservatives. As one review put it, "The two lovers seem just like any other couple."

Even so, it was the gay relationship that had to be most carefully rendered. and the Director took pains to make a film that would speak not to an elite, worldly, film-festival set, but to ordinary Indians who watch ordinary Bollywood films.

In the film, Nikhil is a star swimmer and the golden child in his family until the day he is found to have H.I.V. His parents shun him, his friends abandon him and he finds himself locked up in a dirty sanatorium. The two people who do stand by him are his sister and his partner. One of the most disturbing episodes in the film was lifted from real life. Just as Nikhil is quarantined in the film, the first Indian to be diagnosed with H.I.V., a young man in Goa named Dominic D'Souza, was similarly confined and isolated in the late 1980's. In other words, as Mr. Suri noted, "it took 15 years" to represent that indignity onscreen.

Beautifully scripted and shot, this is a gem of a find