HomeOpinionThe Uncanny Speech Problem in Deepa Mehta’s “Funny Boy” The Uncanny Speech Problem in Deepa Mehta’s “Funny Boy” 21 December 2020 03:26 am - 0
Deepa Mehta’s newly released film “Funny Boy” met with a post-production hiccup when activism sensitive to
Deepa Mehta
linguistic representation and the portrayal of minorities questioned the Tamil roles in the film being played by non-Tamil actors. While some dissenters pointed out that the accents of some players didn’t register as authentic, others likened Mehta’s casting preferences to a form of cultural erasure. These protesters claimed that the film’s Tamil characters should be played by men and women who were born-Tamil and spoke that language to native proficiency. So came about the latest controversy in Deepa Mehta’s long career in film.
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Set in Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s, Funny Boy explores the sexual awakening of its young protagonist Arjun Arjie Chelvaratnam as political tensions escalate in the country between the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese. Even though the film is Canadaâs 2021 Academy Awards entry for Best International Feature Film, the controversy around casting has dogged Funny Boy .
The main cast playing Tamil characters are mostly Sinhalese (Sri Lankaâs majority population) and North Indian which has evoked protests from the Tamil diaspora who have complained of cultural erasure . In the earlier screenings of the film, it was pointed out by critics that several cast members do not speak Tamil properly and haven t got the accented Colombo English quite right.
A group of children with no cares at all, free and reckless, run through thick jungle growth, their feet splashing into the ocean waves crashing on the beach, their bodies chasing a train making its way along the water’s edge. Their outfits are a riot of color, and their play-acting is of a wedding, with one child dressed as a groom in a black suit and the other in a crimson red and gold sari, face smudged with lipstick and eyeliner. But a closer look reveals that the groom in this game is a young girl and the bride is a young boy, and the innocence of their imitation of the grownup world is swiftly and summarily destroyed by the rigidity of adult thinking. “Looks like you have a ‘funny’ one here,” a male relative says of the boy in the sari, and the crushing dismissiveness and casual prejudice of that statement guides us into the world of “Funny Boy.”