NY Times article on Mira Nair
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/movies/11jame.html?ref=movies&pagewanted=printThe Endless Journey Home - March 11, 2007
By CARYN JAMES
MIRA NAIR’S next film will be the biggest she has ever tackled, with
Johnny Depp as the lead and a budget of about $100 million. The film,
“Shantaram,” which she has just agreed to direct for Warner Brothers, is based on Gregory David Roberts’s autobiographical novel about an Australian robber and drug addict who escapes from prison and reinvents himself by starting a medical clinic in the slums of Bombay.
Beneath its starry high profile, though, “Shantaram” engages issues that have obsessed Ms. Nair throughout her career. For immigrants and their children, what is home? What is family? How do you forge a new cultural identity?
“He is a man who disappears into the fabric of another place,” Ms. Nair said about the Depp character in a recent conversation. Explaining the lure of the novel, she added: “The theme I’m most interested in is, can a foreigner be a native? I’m interested in the seesaw of it, because I’m not sure that in the deepest way that’s possible. Ultimately you have to understand where you came from. Otherwise you’re lost.”
Those questions have found their richest expression so far in her beautiful, profoundly moving new film,
“The Namesake,” which opened on Friday. The story moves from Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli’s arranged marriage in Calcutta, to their life in the New York suburbs, where their improbably named son, Gogol, grows to become the most contemporary and American of young men. Its source, Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel, is an ideal match for Ms. Nair’s sophisticated take on the new reality of immigration and assimilation in America, an up-to-the-minute approach too rarely seen on screen.
From the Corleone family in
“The Godfather,” whose intention is to inch closer to respectability with each generation, to the Mexican nanny in
“Babel,” so subservient to her American employers that she forgets the government regards her as a foreigner, the depiction of immigrants in movies is usually a story of assimilation or a sociopolitical study of the underclass. Both approaches are too limited for the world today.
Ms. Nair’s films are not about blending in but about forging a new cultural identity, one that is forward looking yet appreciates and incorporates the heritage of the past. Her immigrant and second-generation characters are doctors, professors and architects, yet they do not instantly assume that it is desirable to lose their ancestors’ traditions.
This celebration of cultural fusion reflects a late-20th-century generational shift. Ms. Nair is 49, and Ms. Lahiri a decade younger, but they are united by backgrounds, educations and cosmopolitan instincts. Ms. Nair, born in India, came to America to study at
Harvard, and is now based in New York but spends months at her homes in New Delhi and Kampala, Uganda, where her husband was born. Ms. Lahiri, born in London of Indian parents, was raised in Rhode Island from the age of 3, then went to Barnard, earned advanced degrees from
Boston University and now lives in New York. A distinctive mark of both Ms. Nair’s films and Ms. Lahiri’s fiction (including her
Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, “Interpreter of Maladies”) is that they are never judgmental or simplistic about characters tied to the old country or about those who choose to leave it behind.
Ms. Nair, who has exuberantly incorporated her Indian heritage in most of her films (even her last,
“Vanity Fair,” which follows Becky Sharp to India) says she is now sent every book published about an immigrant as possible movie material. “They’re usually very simple tales, about brides in arranged marriages,” she said. “That’s not my world, that is not my experience. My experience of New York is about the multiplicity of the old and the very, very cutting edge.”
Ashoke in “The Namesake” is a thoughtful college teacher, hardly cutting edge, but his American-born son is as hip and accomplished as a movie hero comes. (
Kal Penn, playing Gogol, displays a depth you would never guess from his role in
“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.”) As a young man Gogol becomes a Manhattan architect and falls in love first with a blonde from a privileged family and then with a second-generation Indian. But even as he comes to embrace the Indian heritage he had found so amusingly old-fashioned when he was a pot-smoking teenager, he learns that his background is not the deciding factor in life or romance.
The way Gogol creates an identity that is neither purely Indian nor white-bread American may be the strongest link between “The Namesake” and Ms. Nair’s other films, but that was not what drew her to the novel. She read it soon after her beloved mother-in-law died unexpectedly, and saw a reflection of her own grief in that of the characters, who mourn a close family member. Her mother-in-law was buried during a snowstorm in a cemetery in New Jersey, in a scene that sounds as vivid as an image from one of Ms. Nair’s movies.
“A woman who lived most of her life in the red earth of East Africa was being buried in this Siberian snowstorm in Newark,” she said, recalling “the strangeness of burying a parent in a country that is not fully home.” Only on rereading the novel, “did I see the banquet of the two cities where I have lived, New York and Calcutta.”
In “The Namesake” those cities are filtered through the sumptuous visual style Ms. Nair is known for. Her characters may be displaced from their countries, but wherever they have landed she roots them in a vibrantly detailed cinematic world. In
“My Own Country” (1998), made for Showtime and based on Abraham Verghese’s memoir, Naveen Andrews (from
“Lost”) plays Mr. Verghese, born in Ethiopia to Indian parents and sent into exile by the government. Typically for a Nair film it is not his exile which is front and center but his medical career treating AIDS patients in Tennessee. Here the immigrant doctor is the most educated, upscale character.
And the complexities of class, culture and generational change are at the heart of her best-known film, the colorful, joy-filled
“Monsoon Wedding” (2001), in which a sophisticated young woman in New Delhi leaves behind her affair with a married television talk-show host for an arranged marriage with an Indian groom from America.
It is Ms. Nair’s second feature, though, the ambitious
“Mississippi Masala” (1991), that provides the most direct line to “The Namesake.” It followed her stunning first drama,
“Salaam Bombay!” (1988), about street children in India, and couldn’t have been more different. The film begins in Uganda in 1972, when Indians were expelled by Idi Amin. Jay (Roshan Seth), born there of Indian parents, is forced to leave the only home he has ever known along with his wife and small daughter.
When the film leaps to Mississippi in the ’90s, Jay is working in one of the South’s many Indian-owned motels, yet he constantly looks back toward Uganda. His thoroughly assimilated grown daughter, Meena (Sarita Choudhury) shops at the Piggly Wiggly, and on her way home runs into a black man — literally runs into his car with hers — played by
Denzel Washington before the name Denzel alone was enough to identify him. They soon fall in love, and into trouble with their respective families.
The idea for the film, “came from my experience of being a brown person in the middle of black and white at university here,” Ms. Nair said. “I was accessible to both communities but of neither.” And when she learned of the many Ugandan Indians who were running motels in Mississippi, she was intrigued by the idea of “African-Indians who had never known India as their home, and African-Americans who had never known Africa as their home — what would happen if there was an interracial romance?” Among other still-topical issues, the film portrays how ethnic tradition and solidarity can cross an invisible line into bigotry.
It was while researching “Mississippi Masala” that she met her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, like the hero of her film a Ugandan-born Indian and now a highly regarded author and professor of political science at
Columbia University.
Other aspects of Ms. Nair’s life suggest also how swiftly cultural identity in America is changing. She recalls that when she arrived at Harvard in the late ’70s, she was one of three students from South Asia. Another was Sooni Taraporevala, who became a frequent collaborator and the writer of both “Mississippi Masala” and the graceful adaptation of “The Namesake.”
When Ms. Nair was invited back to Harvard to speak to South Asian students 10 years ago, she found a group of about 1,500, many born in the United States. During her not-so-long-ago college days, communication with India was still difficult and trips home rare, a situation that seems archaic in the age of cellphones and e-mail.
In the too-neat ending of “Mississippi Masala” Jay tells his wife, “Home is where the heart is and my heart is with you.” But Ms. Nair’s sense of the intricacies of cultural identity has grown and shifted with world events.
Her contribution to
“11’09”01,” a series of 11-minute responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by filmmakers from around the world, was based on the true story of a Muslim family who had lived in Brooklyn for 20 years and whose son was suspected by the
F.B.I. of being a terrorist after the attacks. He had, it turned out, died in the collapsing buildings when he ran to help. After 9/11 “the experience of those who look like us became so different,” Ms. Nair said. “Suddenly we were the others. It has abated to some extent, but at times continues to rear its jingoistic head. You realize it’s not so simple to blend in.”
Last month she made a short film in Mumbai, as Bombay is now known, as part of a project she is producing for the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, called “AIDS Jaago” (roughly “AIDS Aware” in Hindi). The series of 12-minute movies, by well-known directors and Bollywood stars, will be shown in Indian theaters before Bollywood films.
But it is “Shantaram,” the future project, that makes Ms. Nair sound even more engaged than usual. “There’s something about Johnny Depp that embodies that fluidity between East and West,” she said. His character grapples with issues central to her own past and to her life today, with her husband, their 15-year-old son, Zohran, and their sense of home spread over several countries.
With a freshness and timeliness few directors match, her films reflect that multifaceted cultural identity, a fusion that is both distinctly hers and emblematic of the way American identity itself is changing. “The fact that families are so fluid today, it’s like ‘Monsoon Wedding,’ ” she said. “Fluidity, that is my anchor.”
