Geeta Malik’s film India Sweets and Spices became a prominent 2021 release after being picked up for distribution by Bleecker Street Films and making its way to theaters by the end of the year. The film is one of very few diaspora films centered on an Indian family to be widely distributed, and has now found a streaming home on Hulu. Is the comedy-drama worth the hype?
The Gist: Headstrong Alia Kapur (Sophia Ali) returns home from college for the summer to her small, though upper crust, enclave and immediately clashes with her parents who are stuck in their “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality that takes shape by throwing extravagant parties with the other rich Indian families in the area. At first, as a way of spiting her family, Alia befriends the family that runs the local Indian grocery store who are of a decidedly different social status. But as they become more integrated into Alia’s family’s circle, secrets arise about her mom that will make everyone question what they know about one another.
What Will It Remind You Of?: The premise of a girl returning home for the first time in a while, completely changed, gives Sweet Home Alabama vibes. It’s also a great community-based ethnic comedy of the likes of Netflix’s Definition Please.
Performance Worth Watching: Though this is Sophia Ali’s film, the performances by Manisha Koirala and Adil Hussain as her parents keep the story grounded in its lavish setting.
Memorable Dialogue: Gossiping aunties are a fun bit throughout, and Alia is the only one with the balls to stand up to them. In an amazing encounter, she claps back at the aunties with her own gossip about each of their kids: one was caught in a threeway in the school gym, another cried in class after failing a Physics final, and the last is a pothead. Scandalous!
Sex and Skin: Alia is very open about her sexuality and is sex-positive in her relaitonship, but Malik doesn’t explicitly show that side of the character on screen save for some steamy makeouts.
Our Take: There was a lot riding on India Sweets and Spices as one of the first South Asian-centric films picked up by a major distributor, and for the most part the film is a fresh diaspora story. Alia is outspoken instead of demure and sex-positive instead of prude, and her family is familiar but not stereotypical. There is no big lightbulb about Alia’s relationship to her culture — she is happily Indian and her concerns are more about the way in which her family interacts rather than bumping up against any cultural traditions. Further, the film convenes at various “family parties” (familiar to immigrants of all kinds) instead of at Diwali which has quickly become a tired trope of Indian-American storytelling, and the film shows the very real attitudes about society and class in South Asia diaspora in a meaningful way. This is the primary compliment for the film: it doesn’t retread familiar aspects of Indian culture.
India Sweets and Spices also shines a light on how much immigrant parents give up to give their children the lives they have now. Alia’s mom Sheila, played by Bollywood star Manisha Koirala, gets a rich backstory that is rarely seen for Indian women of her age and made me think of my own parents who sacrificed so much to give their children different lives.
That the film centers on the relationship between a mother and daughter who are more alike than they realize only adds to the richness of the story. It leans into the idea of secret-keeping — that people we know and love could have lived entirely different lives that we don’t know about before meeting them. That distance causes discord in relationships, and Malik argues that this can create distance between family members (On the flip side, Alia’s love interest Varun (Rish Shah) has a deep appreciation and connection with his mom (Deepti Gupta) precisely because she shared those parts of herself).
Still there are some melodramatic bits that don’t entirely work, like an extremely dramatic confrontation in which every person in the community spills tea about each other in front of each other. The scene is trying to show that the central conflict is but one of many types of stories to be told about this community, but it’s a bit clumsy in its delivery as each couple one-ups the last. But it’s not so egregious to write off the merits of the rest of the film, which do center on an Indian family but is ultimately a story about the secrets we keep from one another and staying true to oneself despite community expectations.
Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s family-friendly, has a lot of heart, and is quite funny in its own right.
Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.
