I’ve been watching Mira Nair’s Director’s Commentary on The Namesake DVD, and it’s been surprising to see how much of the film was inspired by other film directors and visual artists’ work. This was a film I liked quite a bit when I first saw it, and it had the unusual distinction of being a film my parents also liked. (I also liked the book, though I know from earlier discussions that a fair number of readers did not.) Watching the Director’s Commentary I realize there was a great deal in Nair’s film I had missed earlier.
Despite the immense amount of craft that went into the making of the film and the strong performances by Irfan Khan and Tabu, I doubt that The Namesake will get much attention come Oscar time. Why not is an endless question; one might point out that the Oscars don’t really award the year’s “best” films so much as the films the major studios feel are at once somewhat “serious” and “commercially viable.”
Still, the nice thing about writing for a blog is, you can pay tribute to the films that caught your attention from a given year, even if no one else agrees with you. (Readers, what desi-related films — produced in India or elsewhere — stood out to you from 2007?)
In the post below, I explore some names from among the large array of people who inspired Nair and collaborated with her as she put together the visual and aural elements of the film. The artists are both Desi (mostly Bengali) and American, though it’s really the former group that leaves the biggest impact on the film.
I hope you enjoy the links below as much as I did assembling them; they make for quite an art history lesson! Milieu
Like Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake is in a sense a “milieu” film. In the first film, Nair used many members of her own family in the smaller roles; in her adaptation of Lahiri’s novel, it’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s family, for the most part, that gets the bit parts — Jhumpa herself shows up, at one point. Nair does use her niece, who was raised in the U.S., to play Gogol’s sister.
Nair also uses an Indian film critic named Jaganath Guha in one bit part, and the famous historian Partha Chatterjee, in another.
One surprise: I didn’t know that Irfan Khan (who plays Gogol’s father, Ashoke) had actually had a small role in Mira Nair’s earlier film, Salaam, Bombay, when he was just eighteen years old, and a student at the National School of Drama.
Bengali Artists and Filmmakers
At one point Ashima’s father is seen painting while sitting back, with his knees up. This apparently is an homage to Satyajit Ray, who painted in a similar posture. Nair also mentions that the sequence where the relationship between Ashoke and Ashima starts to develop (i.e., after they get married and move to the U.S.) is inspired by Ray’s Apur Sansar (“The World of Apu”).
Nair also uses Bengali actress Supriya Devi in a bit part, as another homage to Bengali art cinema (Supriya Devi acted in a number of Ritwik Ghatak films, including Meghe Dhaka Tara).
Asian Underground Musicians
The film’s music is done by Nitin Sawhney. It’s really pretty, understated music that has some powerful moments. Nair also uses State of Bengal’s “Flight IC 408” at one point as the Ganguli family is en route to India.
Baul Singers
In addition to cutting edge Brit-Asian musicians, Nair brings in traditional Baul singers, Lakhan Das and Bhava Pagla.
Indian photographers and Design Artists
The idea for the changing fonts (where the lettering goes from Bengali calligraphy to Roman) in the opening credits comes from Mumbai-based design-artist, Divya Thakur. In her commentary, Nair calls the idea “brilliant,” and I tend to agree (it produces an interesting visual effect, and the symbolism of a transition from one font to the other parallels the idea of cultural transformation that is at the core of both the novel and Nair’s film).
The photographs of the famous Indian photographers Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh inspired a number of the Calcutta shots, including the image, early in the film, of Durga being carried on a wagon on the street in the early morning.
The Taj Mahal
The greatest work of art used in Nair’s film is, of course, the Taj Mahal, and Nair films it from some unusual angles. The most interesting might be her use of the interplay of arches and domes (as in, the view of the splendid domes of the Taj through the arches of an auxiliary building).
Western Artists
The look of the paintings used in the opening credits are to some extent inspired by Mark Rothko. Nair says she wanted a “handmade” look, and the paintings do work that way — the texture of the canvas is visible, as are the brush strokes of the paint within the big swaths of color filling up the screen.
Nair used an installation by Diller and Scofidio at JFK (“Travelogues”), which features images relating to travel using a neat optical effect (produced by “lenticulars”).
The visual style of the whole sequence where the Ganguli family is at the beach in winter is inspired by Chris Marker’s art-house classic, La Jetee.
Quite a number of Nair’s shots at the airport were inspired by photographs by Garry Winogrand.
I don’t mean to be rude, but do people here not know what documentaries are?
Floridian, your comments on “tradition” in The Namesake are intriguing, especially the slippage from “tradition” in Eliot’s sense to “tradition” in the Desi parent’s, “why don’t you marry a nice Bengali girl” sense.
But a couple of corrections — first, Mira Nair didn’t do “Bend it like Beckham.” That was Gurinder Chadha, whose track record as a filmmaker has been much spottier (“Bride and Prejudice”) than Mira Nair’s in my view. Mira Nair has also been much more interesting and edgy about her multiculturalism than someone like Amy Tan, whose work is full of exactly the kinds of cliches that Nair tries to avoid.
Secondly,
Amardeep, the literary critic, may attribute Nair’s airport shots to Garry Winogrand’s work and the beach scene to Chris Marker’s art house classic. Nair may not have even heard of Winogrand or Marker. It is for critics to discern relationships and connections. But the types of work that Winogrand and Marker exemplify must have been sampled somewhere by a bright individual such as Nair, and they did surface unexpectedly in the making of The Namesake. The tradition did its job, and so did the individual.
Nair actually specifically names Winogrand and Marker in her commentary. There is even a “Special Feature” on the DVD where she juxtaposes the original photos by these photographers with her own shots in the film.
Is that what you tell all your
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Did anyone here have problems with the faux-Bengali accents of Tabu & Irfan? I have never heard a Bengali speak like that. It distracted me so much I couldn’t enjoy the movie. Being a Calcutta-born Bengali myself, this was a movie I desperately wanted to like ever since I read Joe Morgenstern’s review in the WSJ after he saw it at the 2006 Telluride film festival, & later saw the trailer. That meandering script, sentences that take an eternity to complete & juxtaposing the Brooklyn Bridge (?) with Howrah Bridge every few minutes didn’t help either.
But my American friends who have seen it loved it. Go figure. Maybe I was expecting too much after Monsoon Wedding.
Touche. 🙂
Yes.
Loved monsoon wedding, Namesake not so much. Irfan Khan and Tabu were amazing, faux accents and all. The older couple’s journey, their struggles felt more compelling, their story more captivating. Gogol and Moushumi’s trials and tribulations on the other hand felt self inflicted and ultimately uninteresting. I could care less what happened to them by the end of the movie.
Floridian, I wanted to chime in on the chicken-and-egg part of this discussion, and Amardeep’s comments on the photographic influences that Mira Nair pointed to, when the film was released in NY last year, there was also an exhibition called Namesake/Inspiration at a gallery here.
I don’t have the little guide from it handy right now, but I do recall some quote/s of MN there saying how these pictures had inspired her work on the film. (The above URL is a link to my account of the opening night, with Ms. Nair, Tabu, and Irrfan Khan all in attendance.)
Happy 2008, y’all.
Amardeep #52: “Floridian, your comments on “tradition” in The Namesake are intriguing, especially the slippage from “tradition” in Eliot’s sense to “tradition” in the Desi parent’s, “why don’t you marry a nice Bengali girl” sense.”
I thought I was being quite consistent with “tradition” in Eliot’s sense. The literary tradition behind “The Namesake” is the genre of “transplanted culture” stories that Nair herself had done so brilliantly before, as did Amy Tan and Gurinder Chadha, who happens to be my favorite. I saw “Bhaji on the Beach” again recently, and it still felt edgy.
I apologize for attributing “Bend it Like Beckham” to Nair. I had a memory lapse.
Amy Tan does seem dated now but when she first appeared on the scene, her stuff was as fresh as Lahiri’s. It goes to show that a genre alone does not guarantee an author a long shelf life. The work has to stand on its own legs.
Although parts of ‘Namesake’ were aesthetically pleasing, overall, I found the film to be inert and plodding. Nair’s actors are up to the task and her production designer(s) definitely create the setting but she seems to treat the material with too much reverance, simply letting her actors sit there and act out the words on the page. There’s none of the pacing, crispness or flair we’ve seen in her previous works.
Another quibble I had was with Sooni Taraporevala’s script which I thought was lazy and uninspired, simply regurgitated Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel in screenplay form. The novel is supposed to be source material, not a que for the screenwriter to cut and paste dialogue and scenes verbatim.
I like Mira Nair and will always watch anything she puts out but I’m still waiting for her to make a film that combines the scope and storytelling ability she showed in ‘Salaam Bombay’ with the visual sophistication and insight of her ‘Hysterical Blindness’.
What did I miss about this movie? Was there some deep philosophical revelation hidden somewhere? Saw it last night and just barely kept awake.
Check out Ashima’s sari when the family is visiting the Taj. It’s like a deconstructed Indian flag.