Nearly 1,500-page post-Partition epic A Suitable Boy, one of the longest novels in the English language, author Vikram Seth weaves the stories of two upper-middle-class North Indian families navigating ardor, marital negotiations and politicized religious conflict as their newly independent nation sloughs off the stink of colonial British rule. Falling somewhere between escapist period soap (the bread and butter of its Welsh screenwriter, Andrew Davies) and sensorial family saga (the lifeblood of its Indian-American director, Mira Nair), BBC’s anglicized six-episode A Suitable Boy adaptation seemingly fails to capture the ideological vastness of Seth’s vision, instead opting for accessible tawdriness. It is one of the most expensive British miniseries ever made, and yet still lacks the visual and textual artistry a tale of this scope requires to truly electrify the viewer. It airs on Acorn in the U.S.A Suitable Boy Season 1 Download.
Davies and Nair are not constrained by time or budget, but imagination. David O. Selznick’s landmark film adaptation of Gone With the Wind skillfully condenses Margaret Mitchell’s 1,000-plus-page best-seller into less than 4 hours of running time without sacrificing scale, tenderness or characterization. Saverio Costanzo’s immersive My Brilliant Friend, the projected four-season HBO serial adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, only enhances its original source material through the lushness of its cinematic grandeur. My Brilliant Friend succeeds in part due to its aural naturalism, Costanzo and his directors permitting the story to inhale and exhale in the native vernaculars of its setting — Neapolitan and Italian — in spite of the books’ international popularity.
A Suitable Boy opens on a Hindu wedding that intertwines the Mehras and the Kapoors, two cosmopolitan families still reeling from the dissolution of the British Raj and the inter-religious discord that resulted in the separated nations of India and Pakistan. Their lives will soon be plagued with violence. The Mehras lost significant stature upon the death of their locomotive engineer patriarch, resulting in his widow’s struggle to make prominent matches for their adult children. Eldest son Arun (Vivek Gomber), a snobbish arriviste, has married a trifling urbanite (Shahana Goswami) who sleeps around and melts down her dead father-in-law’s military medals to make herself some earrings.