The unnamed hunk ( Prateik Babbar) is effortlessly cool, a photographer and artist who favors a certain color that becomes Tanay’s obsession. But those academically-unethical thoughts take a back seat when the elders of the family die, freeing an apartment upstairs that Tanay craves. Yes, he’s narcissistic and effeminate and he sets off the gaydar of his lusty literature professor ( Neil Bhoopalam). He speaks to the spirit of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the family fish pond, and scribbles in notebooks about how “I want to write about Russian boys in Goa!” “I want to write like Chekov, Pushkin and Tolstoy” he enthuses. Tanay ( Neelay Mehendale) is a college kid with dreams of literary glory. Writer-director Sachin Kundalkar, adapting his own novel, serves up one of the steamiest Indian melodramas ever with this softcore love triangle about an aspiring poet and novelist, his tomboyish field hockey star sister and the renter who takes over an upstairs room in an upper middle class family’s house in 1991 Fort Kochi, Kerala, and takes an interest in each sibling in turn.
No, it’s a not a peach this time, but a tangerine, squished until it explodes in a moment of passion. “Cobalt Blue” is an Indian “Call Me By Your Name,” a gay lad’s sexual coming-of-age tale that shares torrid sexual encounters and a few other details from the André Aciman novel that screenwriter James Ivory turned into Oscar bait film five years back.
