Orthodoxies pry, prickly as always. “Special friend” will pry me open A queer Marathi language romantic drama with the mottled, lingering emotional punctuation if not always the verbal pithiness of a haiku, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s narrative feature debut “ Sabar Bonda ” (“Cactus Pears”) brings to earth its gay protagonist’s existential limbo by resorting to a perennially reliable inciting incident: the death of the patriarch, followed by a period of culturally specific mourning. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a thirty-year-old soft-spoken call center worker living in Mumbai, has come out only to his parents, not to his extended family in his ancestral village in the state of Maharashtra to which he returns for a customary ten days of grieving.
That exception itself is noteworthy. Parental acceptance is the destination of many LGBTQIA+ movie plots , even though recent queer cinema seems to have veered away from the trope. In the South Asian context, and particularly in a rural, agricultural, middle India setting where elderly relatives and aunt figures remain avid arbiters within the institution of marriage, for a story to begin with the protagonist’s mother, played with disarming transparency by Jayshri Jagtap, in cahoots with her son to maintain his privacy and defend his choice to not wed, is surprising — and rare.
That powerful mother-son bond is one of two mood scapes of intimacy that Kanawade conjures in “Sabar Bonda,” a film speckled with stretches .
