Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Fayssal Bazzi, Antonia Desplat, Elektra Kilbey, Shubham Saraf
Creators: Steve Lightfoot, Eric Warren Singer from the novel by Gregory David Roberts
Streams on Apple TV+
At the end of Shantaram – after 11 hours of painstakingly slow television – we learn that this isn’t even the end of the story we’ve spent half a day watching. There’s more TV coming – probably of about the same length as the TV you’ve just seen.
Shantaram is perhaps a two percent fictionalized memoir and the rest a pastiche packed with characters and storylines that almost everybody will find entertaining but not memorable.
Shantaram, which stars Charlie Hunnam in its lead role, is the Apple TV+ adaptation of the novel of the same name by Gregory David Roberts. Arguably an autobiography, the book is about a man who commits armed robberies to fund a heroin addiction and then, having escaped prison in Australia, flees to Mumbai to start afresh. Rather than keeping his head down, however, Lin – the fake name the protagonist adopts, along with his passport – is embroiled in violence and gang warfare.
The biggest problem with the series is that Shantaram is only ever as good as Hunnam’s accent and acting.
The story is propulsive and involves a range of intriguing and shady characters: the moment he arrives, Lin meets Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), a devoted and charming guide who will become his best friend; he falls in love with Karla (Antonia Desplat), a French woman mixed up in all sorts of trouble; before long he is doing deals with local gangster Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig); and he attracts unwanted journalistic attention when he becomes a kind of doctor for the locals. The ingredients for an interesting story are there but something is off throughout: the slightly underwhelming acting; the frustratingly slow pace; Hunnam’s infuriatingly zen persona.
His new allies — not quite friends — include wily fixer Didier (Vincent Perez), fiery prostitute and junkie Lisa (Elektra Kilbey), and the enigmatic Karla (Antonia Desplat), whose thoroughly perplexing past, nationality and occupation contribute to Lin falling instantly in love with her.
In very little time, Lin’s bad luck takes him to one of Bombay’s slums and attracts the attention of smooth-talking gangster Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig), who views the repentant outsider as either a son or a pawn. Back in Australia, a grouchy detective (David Field’s Nightingale) is determined to bring Lin to justice.
At 12 hour-long episodes that progress only partway through the book, the first season of Shantaram is Dickensian in its colorful excess and Dickensian in its length. The only thing more repetitive than Lin’s cycle of mini-redemptions and mini-downfalls is the frequency with which he finds himself disrobing.
Hunnam’s patented soulful hunkiness is put to the test by generally awful narration, laden with redundant thematic noodling and the occasional precious reminder that whether or not Lin is on a path to betterment, he’s making everything consistently worse for the people around him.
Saraf’s fast-talking Prabhu takes time to settle in till a romance blooms between Prabhu and Rachel Kamath’s Parvati which ends up lending a sweet human touch to the show.
Bharat Nalluri, who directed the season’s first three episodes, attempts to provide some grounding to settings that were filmed generally on location in India if not actually in Mumbai. The script tries working in several languages and dialects to give the native characters real voices and real vernacular, as much as possible making the shantytown of Sagar Wada more a community of humans than an expansive place in which nameless people poop and fish from the same fetid puddles.
900+ pages are difficult to summarize but a director like Mira Nair could have helped here. Wonder why she wasnt on this project which is way more her forte than anyone elses we can think of.
On the whole, a far cry from the book and its just the first season, so lets brace for Season 2.
