FILMING FUNNY BOY
Director faced many challenges
Nothing is ever easy for Deepa Mehta.
The acclaimed filmmaker has created a formidable body of work over the past three decades and become one of Canada's most respected auteurs. But she also seems doomed to experience strife whenever production begins on one of her epic films or during release — sometimes both.
When she shot her 2005 Oscar-nominated film Water in India, Hindu fundamentalists rioted, made death threats, destroyed sets and forced a move to Sri Lanka. When she returned to Sri Lanka to film her 2012 adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the government temporarily shut down production due to anger in certain parts of the Muslim world.
So Mehta seemed resigned that returning to Sri Lanka to shoot her latest film, Funny Boy, would not be without complications.
“You have to submit your film to the government office, who looks at it and checks to see if there is anything negative about the country or any of the laws,” she says from her home in Toronto. “When we gave the script to the government ... it's called the National Film Corporation, they said no. Their first reaction was no.”
Mehta kept reapplying. After six months, she got conditional approval. “They made sure there was a person from the film commission's office all the time to make sure the script we submitted was the one we were shooting. So it's not just breezing in and saying `Oh, I'm going to go to Edmonton and shoot a film there, or I'm going to shoot to Calgary and shoot a film there.' You just don't do that. We were there for two years, off and on. It was a long process.”
Funny Boy is based on Sri Lankan-Canadian Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 autobiographical novel of the same name, a coming-of-age tale about Arjie, a boy from a wealthy Tamil family, exploring his sexuality as a gay man. It's set in the time leading up to Black July, the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom that preceded a bloody civil war lasting until 2009.
Homosexuality was illegal in Sri Lanka in 1983 and remains so. Arjie's sexuality and the same-sex relationship he has with a schoolmate are a focus of the film, as are the prejudice he faces and the general tension and hatred that surround him as his country descends into chaos. Given that Mehta is not inclined to water down her work, it's hard to believe the government signed off.
“They haven't seen it, so I don't know,” says Mehta, laughing.
She held a small screening at the residence of the High Commission of Canada to Sri Lanka, inviting both Tamil and Sinhalese activists and journalists.
“I think 10 or 15 were called,” she says. “It was a private screening. At the end ... one of the very well-respected Tamil activist-journalists said to me `Deepa, how do you feel?
Because you're never going to be allowed back in the country because the Sinhalese government will not be too happy about what you've done.' I said, `OK, that's happened to me before. So let's see.'”
Mehta first met Selvadurai more than 30 years ago when she was cast in an episode of a TV show based on one of his short stories. She played a traumatized Tamil doctor who comes to Canada as a refugee. When Funny Boy was published a few years later, Mehta tried to option it only to discover “it had been scooped up already.” But nothing ever came of it. Three or four years ago, Selvadurai wrote his own screenplay and offered it to Mehta.
“It was 250 pages long,” Mehta says. “We both had a chuckle about it. I said `This would probably make a good miniseries or something, I can't imagine it being a film.' It was very literal, a literal rendition of the book and it was wonderful but (not if ) you wanted to make a feature film, which is what I thought it should be. Then we decided to work on it together.”
They zeroed in on what she felt was the heart of the story.
“I wasn't so emotionally invested in every character in every scene,” she says. “To me, it was `What is the story about?' It's about Arjie who comes out and comes of age, but the backdrop is civil war. So how do you deal with such extreme and yet similar aspects of rejection or acceptance? For me, the throughline was very different than it might have been for Shyam.”
Getting the right actor to play the central character was key but this proved yet another controversy for the film, which has generated fierce opposition. Members of the Tamil diaspora have called for a boycott of Funny Boy because Mehta did not cast Tamil actors in any lead roles. Mehta cast Brandon Ingram to play Arjie in his teenage years. A young theatre actor based in Colombo, Ingram recently came out as gay. “Talk about the importance of representation,” she says. “Can you imagine having a straight guy playing Arjie? No. It represents also the courage for Shyam to come out, who wrote the book. I felt like I owed it to them.”
Mehta sees the backlash as ironic. “Because nobody has seen the film,” she says. “If Arjie was a Tamil actor but was not gay, I would have got flak for representation. You just can't win either way. For me, what was the more important road to take? It would have been perfect to get a Tamil, gay actor, but the reality is they are apprehensive.
“You are talking about a Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, already subjugated to being, quote/unquote, `second-class' citizens. It's difficult and it really requires courage to do it because you are in the public eye and you are already in the public eye and dealing with homophobia. That's the reality.”
Funny Boy will be broadcast Dec. 4 on CBC and CBC Gem.
When Sri Lankan Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai published his coming-of-age novel in 1994, many filmmakers were keen to bring it to the screen. Gurinder Chadha, who would go on to make Bend It Like Beckham, Bride & Prejudice and Blinded by the Light, seemed like a good fit, but the collaboration never came together.
Then in 2018 came news that fellow South Asian Canadian Deepa Mehta (Heaven on Earth, Beeba Boys), would co-write and direct an adaptation of the now-beloved book. The result has already been named Canada's submission to the 93rd Academy Awards for best international feature.
If that wasn't enough pressure, it's also drawn the ire of Canadian Tamils for its lack of diversity — not enough Tamils playing Tamils — and for imperfect accents that required additional dubbing in post-production. This in a movie in which one Tamil character tells another: “The minute you open your mouth they'll know what you are.”
All of which is to say that Funny Boy will not endear itself to all viewers. It will also prove challenging for many. If you're unfamiliar with Sri Lanka's quarter-century civil war that ended in 2009, or with the role played by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (colloquially known as the Tigers), you may be a little at sea.
But Funny Boy is more than just a political drama. As the first scene makes clear, this is also the story of a gay man growing up in 1970s and '80s Sri Lanka. It's hard to think of what would top the list of “easy times/places to be gay” but this definitely isn't it.
The opening, set in 1974 Colombo, finds young Arjie (Arush Nand) playing at being a girl in a make-believe wedding. Already enamoured with makeup and feminine clothing, he is protected by his sweet if indulgent aunt Radha (Agam Darshi), who is being forced into an arranged marriage and hence understands the pain of not being allowed to follow your heart.
But Radha soon moves away to Toronto, and Arjie, now a bit older and played by newcomer Brandon Ingram, has to find his own way in the world. Fortunately, he makes a new friend at school, the seemingly worldwise Shehan (Rehan Mudannayake), whose father brings home images of gender-bending rock stars from his travels in the West. But Shehan is both gay and Sinhalese, which would seem to doom their future — we've already watched the Romeo and Juliet drama of Radha, whose boyfriend was of the same “enemy” ethnic group.
With so much going on — ethnic tensions leading to sporadic violence, language politics, gay rights (or lack thereof ), it's a wonder the narrative holds together as well as it does.
Mehta sometimes resorts to easy literary shorthand and signposts, trotting out Dickens, Wilde and self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie to signal a mood, or backing Arjie's budding romance with the music of Leonard Cohen and The Police, in addition to Howard Shore's sweeping score.
Perhaps we have become spoiled as viewers by the lure of the Netflix limited series, but Funny Boy feels like it would benefit from a multi-chapter arc, perhaps mirroring the episodic structure of the novel.
Even so, Funny Boy remains at one level approachably universal in its appeal. Take the scene in which Arjie's stern father tells him that he's “funny.” Arjie asks what that means.
“Funny means a bad man who does bad things,” his father explains, gruffly. The little boy tries to figure out how funny can also be bad. Fortunately, he never does.