THE STORY – A dedicated South Asian bodybuilder returns home to care for his aging father, juggling his own well-being with the demands of care-giving. He strives to balance personal goals and filial duty in this touching exploration of family bonds.
THE CAST – Mandeep Sodhi, Amrit Parbhakar, Raj Dhesi, Michaela Kurimsky, Quinn Greene, Erik Athavale
THE TEAM – Ian Bawa (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 88 Minutes
“This is my son,” begins the opening narration of Ian Bawa’s “Strong Son”. Jagdeep (Amrit Parbhakar) is proud of his bodybuilder son, Harvinder (Mandeep Sodhi), but seemingly even prouder of how he raised him, drilling phrases like “strong legs mean stable home” into his head. In Jagdeep’s mind, being physically strong will help his son succeed in life, work, and love, but that hasn’t exactly been the case. Bawa’s camera slowly pulls out from the image of Harvinder (Harvey, for short) doing push-ups to reveal Jagdeep sitting on top of him, showing the disconnect between what Jagdeep thinks he’s doing and what he’s actually doing. Harvey may be physically strong, but he’s struggling mentally. Having just received word that he must move back to his childhood home to serve as primary caregiver to his aging, partially blind father, Harvey breaks down in the gym locker room, unable to reply when asked if he’s okay. Desperate for meaning and a sense of belonging in his life, Harvey starts looking for validation elsewhere, asking out his sweet co-worker Caitlin (Michaela Kurimsky) and training with a gym buddy for an amateur wrestling match. Can Harvey actually work his way out from under the crushing weight of his father’s expectations and come into his own?
Bawa expands on his short of the same name with ease, giving his actors plenty of space to excavate the emotional depths of their characters. Sodhi in particular benefits from the added length, giving himself over completely to Harvey’s emotional breakdowns, which play out in full from inciting incident to first tear to collecting himself enough to move on. While the performance never quite reaches the level of feeling frighteningly real (e.g. Rose Byrne in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), it gets close enough to break your heart. Sodhi brings a bone-deep soulfulness to Harvey that shines through most when he’s struggling – he tends to flex in the mirror whenever he’s at his lowest, and the mixed emotions in his eyes while doing so tell us everything the dialogue doesn’t.
Parbhakar, meanwhile, tears into the dialogue with relish, skewering Jagdeep’s obsession with hypermasculinity. Bawa’s dialogue brings cultural specificity to a universally recognizable character, and Parbhakar captures both sides of that equation with ease, making Jagdeep equally laughable and pitiable in his myopic view of what it means to be a man. Bawa smartly doesn’t provide Jagdeep with a backstory that explains away his behavior. Still, he does allow for some surprising introspection and character growth that would feel inappropriately optimistic if not for the affecting subtlety that Parbhakar brings to the arc, in a performance that’s otherwise quite big.
While some of Bawa’s dialogue can be a bit too blunt in its direct statements of theme, the way he arrives at those statements feels just out-of-left-field enough for the film to not feel too obvious on the whole. The hushed tone never feels too oppressive, relying mostly on Sodhi’s performance to avoid many overused stylistic traps in illustrating Harvey’s breakdowns from directly within his perspective. This can make the film feel a bit slow, but the performances and character dynamics are compelling enough that it never feels dull.
Bolstered by a strong visual sensibility most present in the dream-like sequences of Harvey working out under his father’s strict tutelage, “Strong Son” marks an intriguing narrative feature debut for Bawa. The film’s exploration of the crushing weight of familial expectations and gender performance feels all the more impactful for how it never once tries to posit that Harvey is either compensating for or hiding homosexual tendencies. Societal expectations of gender impact everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. We’ve seen plenty of stories over the years about how this affects gay men, especially closeted ones, so seeing one about a straight man (however implausible his lack of homosexual tendencies may feel in this setting) feels revelatory, even if the film itself isn’t quite great. Still, it makes an impression, and shows that Bawa has strong enough sensibilities as a filmmaker to grow from strength to strength as his career continues.
