Karla, enmeshed in the city’s expat scene but too enigmatic to be really knowable, tells Lin at one point that she doesn’t believe in love: “I think heaven is a place where everybody’s happy because nobody has to love anybody else ever again.” Whether or not her mind can be changed, one yearns for him to move on. This way, he’s not going anywhere.” Desplat is suitably alluring as Karla, but the character’s interactions with Lin generally fail to transcend a certain perfume-ad vagary.
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A smirking journalist (Sujaya Dasgupta) plots to crack Lin’s story and expose him, musing to a friend with Bond-villain silkiness, “If he knows I’m close, he’ll run, and there’ll be no story.
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The series seems less aware of that fact, piling up associates and adversaries from among those whose lives in Bombay are more than an incidental sojourn all of them come across less real to us than Lin does.
I can’t do that if I leave them to die.” The humanitarian impulse is strong so, too, Lin’s perception of those he saves primarily as people meant to witness his own journey. Later, he tells a mentor figure (Alexander Siddig, doing fine work), “I guess I want to be the man they see when they look at me and not the one I see in the mirror. Hunnam adds an effacing quality, an understanding that Lin is working to aid others in part to gain the glow of redemption.
In one scene that Hunnam claws back from cringe-worthiness, friends compliment him on saving lives, saying things like “It’s an incredible story” and “It’s a pretty amazing thing you’re doing” the voice-over indicates that Lin knows the bill will likely someday come due on his escape from prison, but not that he feels anything particularly complicated about situating himself as the savior of the brown citizens of a city he just dropped into. It’s in his performance, if not consistently in the series’ scripts or direction, that we see Lin’s involvement in demanding medical care for Indian nationals as a dance between altruism and a need to be at the center of things. Hunnam, of “Sons of Anarchy” and films including “The Lost City of Z,” is perennially credible as a rough sort who invariably falls into trouble. The casting of Hunnam helps make the case for this - the actor’s expressive face and brute-force charisma transmit everything Lin is feeling, notably the pull of temptation. “Drunk on whiskey and visions of my own redemption,” he tells us, “I’d forgotten what I really was - a fugitive, who needed to stay invisible.”Ī show in which a man on the lam goes into hiding, or at least tries to evade notice, might be an interesting one, but “Shantaram” is telling another, more complicated, story - Lin, who’d benefit from staying anonymous, can’t avoid calling attention to himself. And Lin’s confessions to the audience can have an expatriate headiness that becomes repetitious.
There’s a certain ticking-clock element to Lin’s anticipation of danger that adds chewiness and tension to Bharat Nalluri’s able direction, although given the 12 hourlong episodes, one comes to wish “Shantaram’s” clock might tick a bit more rapidly. Rooted in place by this sense of nascent romance and by a growing affection for the place and its people, Lin begins establishing a life, even while repeatedly telling us that he’s aware that his past - his identity as a wanted man and his knowledge that he’s being urgently sought by the authorities - makes all of this a holiday from reality. Making his way out of an Australian penal institution in the pilot episode, Lin, a recovering heroin addict, seeks to disappear into a city of millions before, potentially, moving on, but is perpetually drawn toward an intriguing, possibly amoral woman named Karla (Antonia Desplat). It’s that dynamic that tends to frustrate over the course of a long season.īased on the novel by Gregory David Roberts and executive produced by Steve Lightfoot, “Shantaram” is set in the 1980s, in the wake of Lin’s prison break. Today known as Mumbai, the Indian metropolis is many things on “ Shantaram,” it’s the staging ground for a white fugitive to lose and find himself. “Bombay felt exhilaratingly free, a place where everyone started new.” That’s Lin Ford, played by Charlie Hunnam, speaking to us in voice-over about the city where he hopes to begin again.
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