Bay Area Reporter :: Sri Lanka queer drama: Shyam Selvadurai & Deepa Mehta s Funny Boy ebar.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ebar.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Funny that way
Set against Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, ‘
Funny Boy’ holds messages for today
Gregg Shapiro | Screen Savor
Based on the acclaimed 1994 novel of the same name by gay writer Shyam Selvadurai (who co-wrote the screenplay), Funny Boy (Array) is directed by Deepa Mehta (who co-wrote the screenplay with Selvadurai). Mehta, who is straight, is no stranger to queer material, having written and directed the award-winning 1996 lesbian feature Fire.
Set in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the mid-1970s and early 1980s, especially turbulent years leading up to the beginning of the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese that lasted for 26 years, Funny Boy is timely for a variety of reasons. At a time when tensions are particularly high here in the U.S., with our own civil war seemingly looming daily, Funny Boy serves as a kind of warning. Equally important is the central theme of sexuality and acceptance that propels the story.
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.”