‘Sixth’: Deft Celebration of Humor and Human Spirit

Waris Hussein’s “Sixth Happiness” has been described as “My Left Foot” meets “My Beautiful Laundrette” meets “The Tin Drum,” and that’s a pretty fair approximation of this most unusual yet beguiling coming-of-age/coming-out movie. It’s based on Firdaus Kanga’s semiautobiographical 1990 novel “Trying to Grow,” and it stars Kanga himself.

It is hard to imagine how anyone else could play Kanga. Now 38 and living in London, he was born in Bombay into a middle-class Parsee family, the Parsees having been driven out of Persia by Muslims some 1,000 years ago. Kanga suffers from a rare brittle-bone disease, which means that so much as a hiccup can cause a rib to break. It also means that he is only 4 feet tall and confined to a wheelchair because his spindly legs cannot carry his small body. But Kanga, who has remarkable dark eyes, is a compelling presence and brings to mind Truman Capote in his forceful personality and an acute sensibility that ranges from the eloquent to the catty.

After a screening of “Sixth Happiness,” Hussein remarked that making this movie was like being on the edge of a precipice the whole time. That’s understandable because the film simply could not have sustained any serious missteps in taste, judgment and credibility.

From the start, the veteran Hussein and Kanga introduce a darkly humorous sense of absurdity that gives the film a sustaining dry, vigorous wit. The baby boy’s condition is apparent at birth, with his mother, Sera (Souad Faress), taking the news briskly in stride while her husband, Sam (Khodus Wadia), is devastated. When the baby’s older sister Dolly (Nina Wadia) suggests, in a child’s joking innocence, that they call him Brit as in “brittle,” Sera goes for it immediately, having already adopted a defiant stance in regard to her son. Besides, it reminds her of Britain, and she is the most ardent of Anglophiles.

Kanga plays Brit from the age of 8 through 18, and he gets away with it under Hussein’s exceptionally sensitive direction. (You have the feeling that he’s changed little physically in the last two decades.) Luckily for Hussein, Kanga has a vivid personality and is clearly a natural actor.

The amount of insensitivity and even outright cruelty directed at Brit in his childhood is breathtaking. Sam, a handsome banker, cannot hide his shame and inability to accept his son’s condition, and when medical science can do nothing for the boy, Sam starts taking him to dubious holy men and faith healers. All this might crush a lesser spirit, but Brit has flourished under his mother’s and sister’s devotion.

Sera is fiercely protective of Brit, yet takes him out into the world. Finally, a very grand but also shrewd and caring Lady Bountfiul (Sabira Merhchant) in the Parsee community sees to it that Brit gets a proper education and builds his self-confidence and self-esteem. Indeed, Brit can carry on like a spoiled maharajah, but as he matures he becomes less self-absorbed and more and more interested in the world around him--which includes a handsome new tenant, Cyrus (Ahsen Bhatti), a violin prodigy turned law student, to whom Sera rents a room.

Hussein, whose most recent film was the zesty period comedy “The Summer House,” has accrued decades of experience in directing both for TV and the big screen--and that experience has served him well. He maintains a high level of awareness that allows him to make persuasive a wide range of circumstances, and that darkly comic sense of absurdity allows Brit and the audience to deal with some very harsh, out-of-the-blue developments in the course of his youth. Brit ultimately discovers salvation in writing.

Spanning 1962 to about 1980, “Sixth Happiness” is also a deft evocation of its period and an affectionate portrait of Parsee family and community life. Much that happens to Brit is calamitous, but he meets life’s losses and setbacks with such a brave, determined spirit that “Sixth Happiness” exudes a quality of lightness that allows it to play far more as comedy than tragedy, rich in its survivor’s sense of humor.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: language, adult themes and situations.

‘Sixth Happiness’

Firdaus Kanga: Brit Kotwal

Souad Faress: Sera Kotwal

Khodus Wadia: Sam Kotwal

Nina Wadia: Dolly Kotwal

A Regent Entertainment release. Director Waris Hussein. Producer Tatiana Kennedy. Executive producers Frances-Anne Solomon (BBC) and Ben Gibson (BFI). Screenplay Firdaus Kanga, based on his novel “Trying to Grow.” Cinematographer James Welland. Editor Laurence Mery-Clark. Production designer Lynne Whiteread. Art director Tom Bowyer. Set decorator Joanna Tague. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

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