In the opening moments of Meet The Patels we learn that film’s subject, Ravi Patel, has recently broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is about to embark on a family vacation to India with his parents and his sister.
Patel is a common name in India and common among those Indians who have moved to the United States. To meet a fellow Patel is to be welcomed with open arms, no questions asked. By the end of this film—a documentary but also a romantic comedy—you want to be a Patel, not because it will afford you passage to free hotels and warm, friendly meals, but because to be a Patel is surely to be loved in a way that too few families love each other.
Ravi’s and Geeta’s parents—Vasant and Champa—married after knowing each other only a short time and they encourage their son to seek out a nice Indian girl. He’s nearly 30 when the film begins and that, by all accounts, is way too old for a nice young man like him to still be single. Of course his parents don’t know that he’d been dating Audrey, a more or less all-American woman from Connecticut, until right before this family trip.
When Vasant suggests that Ravi consider a traditional (read: “arranged”) Indian marriage, the younger Patel resists then decides to give it a shot, learning the etiquette and realities not just of this old tradition but also of dating. The fact is neither he nor Geeta have learned much about dating American style nor neither it turns out have many of the children of expats from India.
If it seems odd at first we learn that both brother and sister have many hang-ups that American kids do too—they don’t always know how to act around members of the opposite sex; they’re not sure what dating actually means and they can’t always be sure that potential partners who look good on paper are going to be all that in real life.
Ravi’s charms as a subject and as an actor (he’s now featured on Grandfathered and Master of None) are strong but they’re nothing compared to the natural charms of his father whose natural humor and affability almost make him the real star of the film. Both elder Patels are the kind of parents many of us wish for with their seemingly endless patience and unconditional love. And when they accept Ravi’s choice of mate at the end of the film we’re warmed in ways that we probably never expected to be at the start.
It’s wise of Ravi and Geeta to have treated this as a documentary rather than a scripted romantic comedy because the subtleties and realities offered here remind us that sometimes what seems unobtainable outside the movies is really within our reach all along.
Meet The Patels screens at Roxy’s Downtown on Friday, Oct. 16, at 1:15 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 18, at 11:15 a.m. at the Garvey Center Forum as part of the Tallgrass Film Festival.
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Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin.
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