For our latest Saucy Deep Dive, we picked Funny Boy, a movie adapted by Deepa Mehta (an Indo-Canadian director) based on Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel of the same name.

Funny Boy is a coming-of-age story about a boy called Arjie from an affluent Sri Lankan Tamil family. It chronicles his journey from childhood to adolescence and early adulthood amidst the ethnic tensions and the divisive Sri Lankan Civil War.

While we loved the queer coming-of-age aspect of this movie, Arjie's exploration and queerness often felt like an afterthought to the plot. We also felt that as a movie intended for non-Sri Lankan audiences, it could have done a much better job of contextualizing the conflict and presenting it as a whole. In its current form, the movie left us perplexed about whether it was a historical queer movie or a historical movie with a queer character?

We also talked about how it fared on our very own film rating system - the Sauce Meter.
To know more about our discussion, read the extended show notes on our website with additional resources and content!

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