From boston globe
A keepsake from ‘The Namesake’
Former BU prof Jhumpa Lahiri was the center of attention at the Big Apple premiere of the new movie based on her best-seller "The Namesake." Directed by Mira Nair, the film attracted directors Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, designer Donna Karan, actors Steve Buscemi, Jacinda Barrett, and Patricia Clarkson, and playwright Eve Ensler. "It was spectacular," said Boston lawyer Sharmili Das, a childhood friend of Lahiri's. "Jhumpa really loved it." Das doesn't only make a cameo, her Indian grandmother lent the director much of the antique jewelry that appears in the film. Asked if she confabbed with Coppola, Das laughed. "I don't like to disturb people," she said.
---
From WSJ...
A Richly Spiced Immigrant Saga
An Endearing, Wry Tale Of Indian Family in U.S.;
March 9, 2007; Page W1
Early in the course of "The Namesake," a young Indian woman, exquisite but disconsolate, stands alone in a spare American kitchen, pondering the riddle of breakfast. She has just come from tropical Calcutta to the ice and snow of New York City with a new husband she barely knows, an ambitious young man who has lived in New York and works in fiber optics. She knows nothing about anything in this city. Warily, she examines a box of Rice Krispies, pours a helping into a bowl, sprinkles it with curry powder and munches a first spoonful of the dry mixture without pleasure. This immensely pleasurable film is anything but dry. It's a saga of the immigrant experience that captures the snap, crackle and pop of American life, along with the pounding pulse, emotional reticence, volcanic colors and cherished rituals of Indian culture.
"The Namesake" was directed by Mira Nair from a screenplay that Sooni Taraporevala adapted from the debut novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. In her previous film, "Monsoon Wedding," Ms. Nair evoked the drama of an extended family by bringing its far-flung members together for a ceremony in New Delhi. This time her story is centrifugal, at least at the start. After an arranged marriage, a pair of almost perfect strangers, Ashoke Ganguli and his bride Ashima, fly off to the United States, where they struggle to put down roots, succeed beyond their hopes and raise an almost thoroughly American son -- the namesake of the title -- with the singular moniker of Gogol Ganguli.
My experience with this family was a reminder of how affecting Mira Nair's work can be. The first time I saw her lovely new film was almost six months ago, at the Telluride Film Festival. Since I hadn't taken notes at that viewing, I saw it a second time a few weeks ago. Once again in the company of characters I'd cared deeply about, I caught myself feeling, irrationally but persistently, that I could predict the Gangulis' future, with all the anxiety and satisfaction that such a gift implies.
Ashima, the initially lonely bride, is played by the Indian film star Tabu, whose skill and tact are equal to her startling beauty, or vice versa. Ashima's future looks bleak at the time of her Rice Krispies repast. She has no way of knowing if the bookish, bespectacled man she has married will be cool to her, cruel to her or simply detached from her as he carves out a career in his adopted land. But that question is answered in a flash, in the sort of outwardly simple, effortlessly complex scene that Ms. Nair does so well.
Ashoke is, in fact, a man of extraordinary kindness and tenderness. He is played by the Hindi actor Irrfan Khan with a brilliance that's all the more astonishing for being self-contained. Your heart could melt when, at a much later point, Ashoke tells his son of the happiness that the boy's birth brought into his life: "Every day since then has been a gift, Gogol." And that's only one of several meltworthy scenes in the movie. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker this material might have been the stuff of soap opera. Here it feels improbably pristine.
The story of how a very Bengali couple's son came to be the namesake of a quintessentially Russian writer is the narrative that informs the family's life, in America and Calcutta alike. (The film, which was scored by Nitin Sawhney and photographed dazzlingly by Frederick Elmes, plays out in both places.) The role of Gogol is therefore crucial, and Kal Penn (of "Harold and Kumar" fame) fills it with a charming goofiness -- the teenage Gogol is a soul mate of Winona Ryder's droll depressive in "Beetlejuice" -- that eventually yields to endearing manhood. Gogol's adventures as the semi-self-invented Nick give "The Namesake" its generational sweep (Jacinda Barrett and Zuleikha Robinson play two of his girlfriends), and his rejection of his heritage constitutes half of the classic template of immigrant sagas. The other half -- reclaiming his heritage when he's wise enough to do so -- brings him to appreciate the parents he's been blessed with. On that score we've been way ahead of him.
AuthorTopic: Namesake.. good reports/reviews (Read 1122 times)
July 03, 2006, 10:25:33 AM