The Boy Who Became Freddie: What Bohemian Rhapsody Left Out
I loved watching Rami Malek disappear into Freddie Mercury. But I left the film wanting more, because the story starts when Freddie is already Freddie. Nobody explains where Farrokh Bulsara went.
Three Countries Before Fame
Farrokh was born in Zanzibar, which was under British protection at the time. His father, Bomi, kept accounts for the colonial office. The family were Parsis, Zoroastrians descended from Persians who fled to India’s west coast roughly a thousand years ago. Even the name Bulsara comes from a Gujarati town called Bulsar.
When he was seven, his parents shipped him off to St. Peter’s, a missionary boarding school in Panchgani, near Mumbai. The British had built it to educate local children in their own image. Freddie supposedly got his nickname there. He also got Chopin, Mozart and Debussy, piano lessons, and his first band. So Britain was part of his world long before he set foot in it.
One Awkward Pause
The movie covers all this in a single scene. His mother mentions Zanzibar to the band, the room goes quiet, and his sister jokes that Freddie was born in London when he was eighteen. It gets a laugh. It also sums up how the film treats everything before England: as something to skip past.
Beyond that, there’s a racial slur shouted at him and some thinly drawn parents. It’s an old Hollywood habit, sanding South Asian lives down until they’re easy to swallow. But Mercury seems to have helped with the sanding himself.
Persian, Apparently
Whenever interviewers pressed him, he’d wave it off by calling himself a “Persian popinjay.” Cute, and evasive. Others took up the line. One documentary described him as Persian by ancestry and Indian only on paper, and his brother-in-law once suggested that if Freddie played down his Indian side, it was because he was really Persian.
That never quite adds up. A family that has lived in India for dozens of generations isn’t Persian in any way that matters day to day. Pointing to Persia was a convenient way to avoid saying “Indian.”
Everything Except the Music
Mercury seems to have understood that you can edit yourself. He dropped the old name, the old places and, to a large extent, the family, and kept the one thing nobody could take from him. Even “Queen” feels like a wink from a kid who grew up with the royal portrait on the wall.
The film gets one thing right. While his mother pulls out childhood photos for the band, Freddie sits there singing himself a birthday song, staring at his own reflection.
Most of us build identity from where we come from. He built his from what he wanted to see in the glass. Whether that was freedom or a kind of loss, I still can’t decide.
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