Director Mira Nair discusses The Namesake at the DMA

by Shawn Parikh

Acclaimed and award-winning director talks about career and upcoming film.

Bollywood is probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Indian film, with its extravagant settings, plethora of songs, and melodramatic acting. I am not putting it down, since I feel that Bollywood’s escapist qualities are necessary and/or entertaining to the public. With the large Indian community in Dallas, there are even two movie theaters that play Bollywood films constantly.

But Mira Nair has taken the opposite route to focus on the truth about Indian life when she makes movies. Her films generally appeal to the American public since they deal with topics that are taboo for Indian film: poverty, sex, race, etc. Her most recognizable films are Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, and Monsoon Wedding, but in the next few weeks, The Namesake (based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling novel), will be releasing nationwide. Her name is pretty powerful for any Indian wanting to do something artistic with their life, so I had to make sure to attend her lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of their Art & Letters Live series, where she spoke about her career and upcoming film.

The first half of her eloquent lecture centered on the origins and milestones of her career. Nair grew up in a small town in India, where she first got her taste of acting by performing political street theatre, which allowed her to make social statements. She was intrigued by acting and went to America for the first time and alone at 18 years old to study at Harvard on a full scholarship. Her acting took a backseat when she realized they were performing Oklahoma!, and she was taking a photography class that allowed her see the power of looking through a frame. She said she began doing film with questions like: "Can art change the world? What is the role of the artist? What is the place of cinema?"

Nair learned the cinéma vérité style at school, which she says "captures the extraordinary of ordinary life." From this, she began shooting documentaries and made five, where she would go actually live with subjects and find a story. For example, for India Cabaret she lived with two strippers in India who discussed their personal lives. Even though her films were being recognized, documentaries were not as popular in the 1980s as they are today, but she believed that cinema could reveal the world and was universal. She received more international acclaim with her first “fictional” movie, Salaam Bombay! which dealt with the lives of street children. She kept making statement after statement, with the interracial topic she covered in Mississippi Masala, the sexuality in Kama Sutra, and the humor she found in arranged marriages in Monsoon Wedding. Post September 11, she was chosen as one of the eleven directors to contribute a short 11 minute film for 11'09"01, where she focused on the "Islamaphobia" that was plaguing the country.

Now, Mira Nair is getting ready for the release of the anticipated film, The Namesake. The latter part of her lecture dealt with adapting the book into film. She ultimately wanted to make the film not only a love story between the parents, but a love story between the parents and their son. She connected with the lead character of Ashima since she had left India to come to the foreign USA, away from all of her family. She had to use the settings of New York and Calcutta to accurately depict the story, and Nair felt that she could bring a lot to Lahiri’s book since she had actually lived in Calcutta and knew the city. In doing so, she found similarities in the traffic, bridges, and spirit between Calcutta and New York, and she began to find a motif of an "in-between world" that relates to the characters blending their cultures. She said that for the film she also had a theme of focusing on images that dealt with connections, such as trains, planes, and bridges.

As far as actors, she had an "angel of casting fly over" her. She roped in two brilliant Indian stars for the parents and the successful Indian-American actor Kal Penn of Harold & Kumar fame. With a large cast, she said she always has to use actors and non-actors, but she feels that talent has no borders. "The fragility of an actor is their power," and she loves creating a space for actors to act like fools and grow.

After the lecture, she hosted a short twenty minute question and answer session with the audience about any topic they wanted to discuss. Then there was a dessert reception and a signing where audience members could meet her one-on-one and ask her a question or just talk to her. I got to ask her what her parents thought of her when she was young doing such bold, controversial work and she said, "They didn’t quite get it. It took them awhile to understand it, but now they see the power it can have."

Her eloquence and genuineness made the night spectacular. The Arts & Letters Live Series at the DMA mostly consists of authors coming to discuss and sign books, but also has performances and readings as well. Another special event to be coming soon is Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, who will stop by around the time the production comes to Dallas.

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