the young people's professor

One of the strangest moments I can remember in India is going to see Mira Nair's 2000 film Monsoon Wedding, a family drama about a traditional Punjabi wedding in Bombay. I remember going to see the film in a crowded movie theater in the largely improvised city of Madras. The stark juxtaposition of Nair's glossy and cosmopolitan representations of Indian life against the grim lived experiences of those populating the theater has always struck me as disturbing.

Nontheless Monsoon Wedding remains one of my favorite films, even though it's certainly a watered down, Eurocentrized version of Bollywood cinema. For the past two years Mira Nair (who some of you may remember for her earlier film Mississippi Masala staring Denzel Washington) has taught at the Gallatin School at NYU and has offered extremely popular undergraduate courses in South Asian literature and culture. A few weeks agos I found out than Nair's latest film The Namesake, based on the novel by Pulitizer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, will open here in New York at the Angelika Film Center on March 9th. It opens in India on March 27th.

My feelings are ambivalent. While The Namesake offers a rich cinematic alternative to the bullshit options currently available (i.e. Norbit), the film is still undoubtably plagued by elements of that problematic "multicultural America" narrative that made CRASH so dam possible.

Nonetheless, i'll be at the Angelika on March 9th when the film comes out. It's a lot better than Hannibal Rising and the like. Will you be there?

Trailer for The Namesake