UnIndian review – Brett Lee's film debut as lanky and charming as its lead

Former cricketer Brett Lee, remembered as one of the fastest bowlers in the history of the sport, has made a ballsy career switcheroo from the oval to the big screen – starring as the male lead in a cross-cultural Australian romcom about a sweet Caucasian bloke and a beautiful Indian woman with conservative heritage. Joining director Anupam Sharma’s film UnIndian hardly suggests a cash-in of the Michael Jordan in Space Jam ilk. One suspects this deal was rather less lucrative, meaning Lee’s move into acting was presumably because he actually wanted – the horror, the horror – to become an actor. The athlete’s transition from stumps to screen isn’t exactly DeNiro from Mean Streets, but UnIndian’s heart-on-sleeve screenplay hardly requires great gravitas. Lee plays Will, a teacher of “Aussie English” whose job is more or less to make international students aware of the difference between saying things like “good day” and “g’day.” He falls head over heels for beautiful single working mother Meera (a radiant Tannishtha Chatterjee). We meet Meera’s parents early, performing puja in her new home. They jostle about Meera’s embrace of the Australian way of life. Mum says to dad “your daughter’s a Western person now” and Meera replies, half-jokingly, that she’s “such a typical Indian mum”. It begins in good humour but the pull between Meera’s roots and future creates tension later, when she inevitably faces the choice between a traditional marriage or life with this lanky man ofsimple but endearing charm (qualities equally apt to describe the film). For some western audiences, the proposition of an arranged marriage in the final act of a romantic movie could mistakenly be considered a cliché. For others it is a very real dilemma. UnIndian, the first feature financed by the Australia India film fund, is likely to resonate with many here and overseas. Lines like “a hottie with a dot” are intended as playful and good-natured. Likewise, the scene where Will’s buddy TK (Arka Das) warns him against underestimating “the power of the ICN” – that is, the Indian Community Network, where gossip around who’s seeing who gets circulated like a viral gif. A dramatic trigger to spur on the final act comes in the shape of a dapperly dressed, distractingly cartoon-like baddie who stops just shy of twirling a moustache. Commonplace touches like this clearly signpost the film as play-to-the-back-rows fare. This probably works best as a date movie, a film for audiences partial to a bit of romcom fluff who don’t mind being taken down the garden path when it comes to predictable storytelling tangents. Nevertheless, UnIndian is certainly not without a marketable point of difference: how many movie comedies – or movies period – have you seen about Caucasian Australians dating Indian Australians? Spoonfuls of sugar and romcom to-and-fro help the medicine go down and the film feels freest and at its most agreeable when Sharma and screenwriter Thushy Sathiamoorthy tap into that wonderfully kind Indian humour – a warm mixture of community spirit and self-deprecation.