The Namesake
I like India-born director Mira Nair’s work because she appreciates the romance of arranged marriages—something for which Hollywood, with its false notions of emotion-driven romance, has little use. Her latest movie, The Namesake (based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel of the same name), follows in the footsteps of 2001’s Monsoon Wedding, helping me to forget her dull and rambling version of Vanity Fair (2004).
One of the most interesting things about The Namesake is that, though it covers about 30 years in time and takes place in both the U.S. and India, it isn’t rambling. I’ve rarely seen a movie cover so much territory without unraveling at some point.
The movie begins with a train ride in India that shapes the life of Ashoke Ganguli, a young Bengali man. He happens to be reading a book of Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s short stories on the train, a book his grandfather gave him. As the events of that evening unfold, it becomes clear why Gogol becomes a touchstone for his life.
Years later, as an American doctor informs Ashoke and his wife Ashima that their newborn son can’t leave the hospital until he has a name (they want to wait until Ashima’s grandmother can name him in an official ceremony), they inscribe “Gogol Ganguli” on the birth certificate.
The film covers many stages in Gogol’s life, and his complicated relationship to his heritage is embodied in his many changes of opinion about his birth-certificate name and his “good name,” Nikhil (shortened by his rich, white girlfriend to “Nick”). Gogol/Nick can be maddening at times, but the film refuses any easy solutions to his identity crisis. He goes through a stage of thinking re-embracing his Bengali roots will solve everything, and in a simpler movie, it would—but not here.
Gogol’s second-generation immigrant quandary is balanced with the love story of his parents, played by Irffan Khan and Tabu, both Bollywood superstars who act with powerful subtlety in The Namesake. And this is where the arranged marriage comes in. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nair reveals how she saw these two main stories as the center of the movie:
“You know, any adaptation is about sifting, and right from the word go I wanted the film to rest on two pillars. I wanted to make an exquisite adult love story of [Ashoke and Ashima], coming from a generation where it’s about, like, literally having a cup of tea in the stillness of a morning and the way you look at each other, rather than what we are so used to in our tangle of the younger culture, you know, roses and diamonds. But this is not Ashoke and Ashima, this is not their generation, and for me it was clear to make that love story and then counterpoint it with Gogol’s coming of age. It was clear from moment one that we wouldn’t deal with Gogol’s high school or Yale years. And once I sorted out this idea of the two cities [New York and Calcutta] as one, that was the glue [by] which I kind of meshed the passage of time. That’s how it really began.”
A few reviewers have complained that the movie felt incomplete, but I think that’s part of the point—again, it refuses easy solutions. And, yes, the movie does have an episodic, almost sketch-like feel, with the large jumps in chronology, but if it had tried to fill in more, I think it would have actually lost focus rather than gained it. The only major flaw I see in the movie is the white girlfriend, Maxine, whose character seems so stereotypical that it’s hard to see why Gogol ever fell for her.
Nair’s films are all praised for their rich visual tapestry, and, though I’m no good judge of such things, I think The Namesake is no disappointment in that area. Though I do wish there was a man randomly eating marigolds, like in Monsoon Wedding.
Add comment May 4th, 2007