Click here to read Mira Nair Leads with Her Heart in 'The Namesake' By LISA TSERING
India-West Staff Reporter
SAN FRANCISCO - Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's novel "The Namesake" has touched many readers, but for Mira Nair, it felt like she was reading her own life story.
Brought up in Kolkata, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was struck speechless by the novel, which tells of a young Kolkata couple, Ashok and Ashima (played with unforgettable intimacy by Irrfan Khan and Tabu), who settle in New York and raise two Americanized children.
Nair's new film, "The Namesake," opens Mar. 9 in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and expands its release to other cities in the coming weeks.
One of the film's most haunting images is of Ashima, bundled up in a sweater in a chilly New York apartment, watching her husband leave the house on his way to work, leaving her alone for another solitary day.
"I still have trouble wearing frocks, and negotiating clothes in the winter, like Ashima," Nair recalled during a recent interview at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
Just 19 when she left India to study in New York, Nair says she came "as a student embraced by an institution, instead of coming as someone's wife, staying home while he has the outside world."
"But I've lived in Calcutta and New York City for my youth and most of my adult life," she told India-West. "I know these places like the back of my hand, and I know what it's like to look out of your window and see the Long Island Bridge and imagine it's the Howrah Bridge, and let your mind take you there."
Nair wanted to get inside the soul of Lahiri's characters and places, so she interviewed the author at length (even casting her in a small role in the film), and spent time with her family to develop a keener sense of the pressures they felt when trying to navigate different worlds.
Nair enlisted screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, her collaborator on "Salaam Bombay!" and "Mississippi Masala," to turn the novel into cinema, and Lahiri gave the project her blessing.
While the first half of the film follows Ashok and Ashima's adventures in a new land, the second half follows their son, Gogol (Kal Penn), as he falls in and out of love with a succession of beautiful women - played by Jacinda Barrett and Zuleikha Robinson - and comes to a deep appreciation of his own Bengali culture.
Nair praises Penn for his ability to "capture Gogol's angst, Gogol's awkwardness and Gogol's distinctive coming of age."
Penn, too, told India-West in a phone interview that what sets Nair apart is her "capacity for telling human stories from the heart. I hope that, after seeing a film like this, people are moved, calling their parents, hugging the people they love." Indeed, he credits Nair for inspiring him to become an actor in the first place, when he saw "Mississippi Masala" as a teenager and saw Indian faces on the big screen.
The true star of this film, though, is the luminous and fascinating Tabu, whose soft voice belies Ashima's wisdom and strength as the character ages from 23 to 48 with complete believability.
"Tabu is so different in life from Ashima, but she completely surrendered to the whole 'Bengalicization' of her," said Nair. "We reinvented the musicality of her voice, her gait, her hair, the delicacy. I really wanted this to be an incredibly delicate portrayal of a strong woman.
"She's got a map of life in her eyes. She's really seen the world. I needed that for Ashima, it was imperative. She had to play this dewy bride as well as convey the gravitas of someone who had lived through the blows of life.
"People are just raving about her performance. Premiere Magazine raved about her and in Yoga Journal she's looking gorgeous."
Fans of Irrfan Khan will be charmed by this role, a quiet, bespectacled intellectual in sweater vests that's worlds apart from his fiery work in "The Warrior," "Maqbool" (in which he played opposite Tabu in Vishal Bhardwaj's 2003 Shakespeare adaptation of "Macbeth") and a long list of Bollywood credits. Nair gave Khan his movie debut in "Salaam Bombay!" and he recently wrapped shooting a leading role in "A Mighty Heart," starring Angelina Jolie. "He is a great, great actor," said Nair. "In this film, he keeps everything to himself and his surface is always very calm, even though there is so much going on within him."
Nair was inspired to become a filmmaker when she saw her first Satyajit Ray film at the age of 21, when she was a student at Cambridge University. "I am still very much a fan," she said. "I dedicated this film to [the late art film director] Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, because they are both great Bengali filmmakers. Their work influenced how I wanted to approach the scenes of the early years of Ashok and Ashima's lives in Kolkata - strangers who fall in love. I did think of Ray's Apu trilogy: the economy and the tenderness and the sweetness."
Nair has also made her share of documentaries, from 1999's "The Laughing Club of India" to "Children of a Desired Sex," a 1987 film about the growing and disturbing trend of sex selection in the big cities of India. She is currently in the early stages of a new documentary about the eight weeks the Beatles spent in India studying with the Maharishi in 1968. "They wrote 48 of their best songs during that time, so I am making a documentary about inspiration," she told India-West. "When I get turned on by something, I love to make a documentary about it."
Another topic Nair is putting her attention into is the Avahan India AIDS Jaago Initiative, which partners with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to put leading filmmakers such as herself, Vishal Bhardwaj, Farhan Akhtar and Santosh Sivan into service to create contemporary and entertaining short films to disseminate information about the AIDS menace in India. The films will be screened before major Hollywood films in Indian theaters. "Our love for cinema almost equals worship. We will attach them with big banners so that people going in to watch blockbuster films will be able to see this," Nair told reporters at Jaago's launch in January.
Now that "The Namesake" is ready for release, Nair is happily throwing herself into her next big-budget project, "Shantaram," based on Gregory David Roberts' semi-autobiographical story about an Australian heroin addict who escapes from prison, arrives in Mumbai with a fake passport, and creates a new life for himself in India's most reckless city. Johnny Depp stars and produces the film.
"We hope to start shooting from November to March. It will be a very long shoot, over four continents," she explained.
"I think it's an amazing monumental novel, that gets the continuum between East and West right for a change. We are so used to seeing the "white man comes to the dark continent to help us light a bulb and then goes home" story; but Gregory Roberts' story is so truthful and compassionate.
"This is a man who comes bereft of honor, with a conflict, someone who doesn't believe in himself or see his self-worth. Through a series of happenstances, he finds people who live very close to the ground in Bombay. They unwittingly teach him one or two things about what honor is, and then he achieves that honor for himself.
"For Johnny Depp, it is a bible. He really loves this book, and he is also someone who is so well-suited because he embodies that East-West fluidity and he has the humility to interpret that," she said.
Nair has worked with many actors who went on to achieve greater fame - Oscar-winning Denzel Washington, Reese Witherspoon and Marisa Tomei; ABC "Lost" star Naveen Andrews (twice); Indira Varma, Sarita Chowdhury and Nana Patekar, to name a few.
Asked how she saw that indefinable spark in those actors - especially Denzel Washington - she replied, "Denzel turned me on! He's really got something smoldering and quietly powerful. There was a vulnerability that I demanded from him that he wasn't about to show me. But he did. I made 'Mississippi Masala' in a stupor of love myself and I knew what that felt like, and he had to make me feel the same way. It is intuition.
"I'm an aesthetic. If I'm working with an actor, I have to really want to look at them, for one or two years out of my life. I have certain looks I respond to and don't respond to. My intuition makes me different from you or anyone else. Which is also why I cast non-actors as freely as legendary actors."Long before she stepped behind a camera, Nair was an actress herself on the stage in New Delhi. One of her stage mentors was Barry John, founder of the Delhi-based actor troupe the Tag Group. (Shah Rukh Khan, too, was a protege of John's, but a few years later). "[Khan and I] are good friends, but I haven't worked with him," explained Nair.
In this era of Shyamalans and Chandrasekhars casting themselves in their films, why don't we see you onscreen? asked India-West.
She merely laughed. "There are loads of others who can do it better. I am just not interested!"
Nair calls "The Namesake" one of her favorite films in her nearly 20-strong oeuvre.
"There are some films that I recognize just came right," she said. "The elements just fell into place. 'Salaam Bombay!' and 'Monsoon Wedding,' and this one.
"I don't suffer with these films. They are what I wanted them to be."
:by indiawest