Road Tested

For the roaming Mira Nair, inspiration is a plane ticket away.

by Cindy Fuchs

NAIR DO WELL: The Namesake director hovers about Tabu, who plays the matriarch of the Ganguli clan. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Mira Nair has a cold. She's been traveling for her new film, The Namesake, and recently has been laid low by one of those stuffy-airplane-cabin-borne viruses. But she's hardly slowed down. To the contrary, it's as if her sensitivity is heightened.

Born in Rourkela, Orissa, and educated at Delhi University and Harvard, Nair makes films about movement — across continents and generations. In her debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, the movement was at once limited and incessant, tracking street kids hustling to survive. Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding expanded her carefully composed color and political palettes, as did her segment of 11'09'01 (titled "India") and 2004's Vanity Fair. With The Namesake, based on Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel, the director has found an ideal subject — a family full of complex characters who spend their lives traversing traditions and expectations.

Nair says that her background and continuing interest in documentary shapes all of her fictional films. "I go out with the camera, without actors, and we shoot, because documentary is my treasure, like life is my treasure," she says. Filming in Calcutta, she recalls, provided particular opportunities for "orchestrating chaos." When a crowd of fans showed up at the train station, Nair laughs, "We had a super-mob watching us and a super-mob within us. It was a crazy scene, but it also was so unbridled with life. I love that."

At the same time, though, her compositions were "conceived in a kind of austere, photographic style, and inspired by great photographers like Garry Winogrand and Raghubir Singh." She delicately shapes the space in front of her with her hands: "I had these frames in my head as a leaping-off point for many images."

This aesthetic is of a piece with her political and cultural sensibilities, as she "actively live[s] in three countries," including South Africa. For The Namesake, she says, "it was uncanny, that it was set in the two cities in which I a) grew up, Calcutta, and b) formally learned to see, New York. I decided to shoot the two cities as if they were one, cutting between [the Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River and Manhattan's 59th Street Bridge]." Knowing these places so well, she says, "made it easier to make transitions, without resorting to cliches and spoon-feeding by subtitles and voiceover and all that."

Read Cindy Fuchs' review of The Namesake. 

Nair says she was especially interested in emblems of transit — bridges, train stations, airports — finding inspiration in Winogrand's book Arrivals and Departures. "Airports," she smiles, "are like a temple for an immigrant. We're always in these neutral spaces, we live our most crucial hours in them." She describes the scene when Ashima (Tabu) and Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) say goodbye at JFK as composed of layers, visual and emotional. Though it's only one shot (they worked on a tight schedule and budget), "You get everything: the gulf between them, the fact that they don't touch and hug and kiss to say goodbye, but their deep love is visible."

Reminded of another affecting shot, in which Gogol (Kal Penn) slips his feet into his father's shoes, Nair nods. "This whole film was inspired by grief. I had just lost my mother-in-law." She remembers cleaning her hospital room. "When I opened her cupboard, she had left her perfume, all in order, and these exquisite, tiny Ferragamo shoes. She would never step in them again."

The Namesake's younger, "American" generation — including Gogol, Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) and Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson) — are all at first inclined to leave the past behind. Nair sees the WASPy Maxine as embodying a "subliminal arrogance, as if she thinks, 'This is my world.' It's a very different experience when you're the Gangulis, and you have to negotiate and you have to be mindful of the other community. We're not taught humility in the U.S. In India, it's a big part of life. That's why America is what it is, too. It gallops along and does its thing."

Nair says she encounters Maxine's "attitude" frequently. "[Interviewers] ask me questions that they would never ask another film director, and they're not even aware of it. The typical 'arranged marriage' question, or some other version of the 'hothouse flower' question, as I call it. Like, 'Ooh, you flew in from another planet. Describe it for us.'" She sighs, "In America, it's not a habit to put yourself in someone else's place, to see things are larger than you."

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)