Film Review: My Indian Boyfriend (2021) by Sri Kishore

The romantic comedy “My Indian Boyfriend” is the second movie by Hong Kong-based director and dance instructor Sri Kishore, and the first shot in the country he has called home for more than a decade. With it, he has tried to create the first Bollywood-style Hong Kong movie in history.

“My Indian Boyfriend” is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival

Krishna (Karan Cholia in an over the top Bollywood performance), a good-for-nothing young Indian man who lives in Hong Kong with his mother and father, falls in love with Jasmine (Shirley Chan Yan-Yin), a Chinese model and dancer who moves to his apartment building. The problem is that she is promised to Richard (Justin Cheung), a slimy rich older man whom she doesn't love.

“My Indian Boyfriend” is a mess. There's no doubt about it. The story makes no sense most of the time, neither do the relationships between the characters. Someone can be Krishna's friend one scene and then simply betray him out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever. This happens not only with secondary characters but with ones that seem important for the plot. Like Krishna's main rival for Jasmine's heart, the slimy Richard. Just that it, early on, turns out that he isn't a rival at all, because Jasmine hates him, even is disgusted with him. And he doesn't try to do anything to win her over, only abuses her and even physically assaults her from time to time. Like almost everything else in this film, he is just there whenever the screenplay needs him as a plot device. Like everything else here, he simply exists to drive the story forward.

Tonally, this Bollywood-style Hong Kong romance is all over the place. That would've been fine in the hands of a better writer and director, it could've even benefitted the movie. After all, Bollywood and Hong Kong cinema are known for their dramatic tonal shifts. Sadly, in Sri Kishore's hands, these changes seem random and uninspired, not engaging and compelling. For example, Krishna seems to hate Jasmine at the beginning and then suddenly falls madly in love with her. Sure, that is a trope in this genre, but never have I seen a weaker and more unbelievable falling in love than the one here. There is just not reasons for us (or for Krishna, for that matter) either to hate or love Jasmine. He simply doesn't know her. This makes him seem more stalkery and creepy at times than truly romantic.

I know that some of the readers might say that this is simply a funny romcom and I am taking it too seriously. It just follows all of the beats of a Bollywood and Hong Kong movies, trying to appeal to fans of both and possibly to make a bridge between them. And that's all good, but good romantic comedies and melodrama, no matter how cliched, predictable, and over the top unbelievable they might be, work precisely because the viewers become invested in the story and the relationship between the leads. And here we simply can't do that, because it's too random, predictable, yet out of nowhere.

I don't mean to say that “My Indian Boyfriend” is a terrible film and no one should see it. It's not good, sure, but there are also glimpses of the good movie it might have been, that shine through at times. We see this best in the music numbers, of which there are many. Most of them are in Hindi and Telugu, because they are from Krishna's point of view. But when we see the story from Jasmine's perspective midway through the runtime, the song changes to a Cantopop one. And when the two of them finally get really together after she recovers from an illness (and no, this is not a spoiler for anyone who has even seen a single East Asian melodrama), the two cultures meld and we hear an Indian melody with Cantonese lyrics. It's pretty neat, if anything else.

The way the movie represents the life of Indians in Hong Kong also seems close to reality and, possibly, the experience of Sri Kishore. Krishna, who seems like a stand-in for the director, who is also an Indian dance instructor, is constantly being casually discriminated against. Every Chinese person he meets, except for his close friend Kong, thinks he is a gangster, a lazy bum, or a thief. A prospective employer even goes as far as to tell Jasmine that she doesn't hire South Asians while Krishna is present. Her mother does something similar, telling her that South Asians are not a good fit for Chinese people. Why, exactly, she doesn't say and it looks like it she doesn't need to, because it's common knowledge.

Despite its numerous flaws, “My Indian Boyfriend” is a watchable, and at times, even pleasant movie that tries something new. As most first tries, it doesn't manage to reach the bar it has set for itself. This isn't a necessarily bad thing, but makes the movie hard to recommend, especially having witnessed glimpses of what this modern romantic comedy could have been.