Going Deepa into Sri Lanka
Mehta’s new film struggles to get government nod
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, ‘ secondclass’ 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.”