| This is the first Bollywood movie about AIDS. Nikhil (Sanjay Suri) is a nice guy
who wakes up one fine morning, leaves his house and gets arrested. His
crime: testing positive for HIV. A competitive swimmer, he is abandoned by
everyone in his life his mother, father, friends and fiancé until all he has
left is his sister. Confined in an isolated sanatorium, Nikhil is left to rot.
Don't worry, India isn't quite like this today. MY BROTHER NIKHIL is set in the
mid-80's, a time when the clothes were ugly and AIDS was pretty much completely
misunderstood. Starting out like a standard-issue Bollywood film where
everything is happy and bad things happen only with a burst of dramatic music,
MY BROTHER NIKHIL lures you in with its sunny simplicity before turning darker
and more complicated like a sudden thunderstorm on a cloudless Spring day. Going
out of its way to parse the entire issue (the difference between HIV and AIDS,
the spread of AIDS among both queers and straights, etc.) MY BROTHER NIKHIL is
one of the first Hindi-language movies to speak so frankly about a subject that
is socially unacceptable all over the world. |
