I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I've softened a little on Kal Penn's performance, but I'm now an even bigger fan of Tabu and Irrfan Khan (the star of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, despite Angelina Jolie's top billing).
This time I was more conscious of how clever the script is with the references to names and naming and also the extent to which Mira Nair pays hommage to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak (and makes Bengali jokes). The central question is, I think, how the film creates a delicious tension between its focus on Ashima as against the father-son relationship. I'm still not sure who is at the centre of the story. What does anyone else think?
Showing posts with label Indian Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian Cinema. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Pen Pictures of directors (1): India
Some directors who will feature on the course, who you may wish to investigate:
Deepa Mehta
This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in philosophy from Delhi University. She started directing aged 40 in Canada and she is best known internationally for her trilogy of films set in India. This ‘elemental trilogy’ deals with issues relevant to women in Indian society. Fire (1996) looks at a marriage in which a young woman discovers that her husband has married her for convenience and she is drawn into a relationship with her sister-in-law.
Earth (1998) concerns the fate of families caught up in the struggles over Indian partition in 1947 in a story seen from the perspective of a young girl and Water (2005) focuses on the fate of a child bride who is widowed and forced to live in a house with other widows in 1930s Benares. An important aspect of Deepa Mehta’s work is her casting of Shabana Azmi, one of Indian Cinema’s leading female stars, who has herself undertaken several campaigns on feminist issues. Another star, Nandita Das appeared in the first two films of the trilogy and would have joined Shabana Azmi if production on Water had not been halted by the disruption caused by Hindu fundamentalist protestors. For more about Water, read the brief review on our associate blog.
Mira Nair
Born in Orissa, Mira Nair also went to North America to train as a documentary filmmaker, basing herself in the US. She began directing in her early twenties, but first came to international attention with Salaam Bombay in 1988, a documentary-drama about streetchildren in Bombay, funded by public and private investors in India, Channel 4 in the UK and a French production company. In 1991 she made Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial affair between the daughter of East African Indian immigrants (played by Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man in the Southern US (played by Denzil Washington). After some less successful films, she finally had a major hit with Monsoon Wedding in 2001, which married the conventions of very different forms of cinema – the loose visual style of European and American Independent Cinema with the intensity of Indian Parallel Cinema and the exuberance of Bollywood.
In 2004 Reese Witherspoon starred in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, which perhaps didn’t get the big audiences it deserved, and in 2006 she directed The Namesake which we will be screening on the course. Again, there is a a brief review of this film on our associate blog.
Although Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have similar backgrounds and are both 'diaspora filmmakers' returning to India to make films, the films themselves look and feel quite different. Deepa Mehta's films might seem to be more concerned with 'issues' and her Indian films have something of the qualities of Indian 'Parallel Cinema', the socially conscious 'alternative cinema' of the 1970s-80s. This makes Water, with its use of music by A. R. Rahman, the leading composer of Indian popular cinema, particularly interesting as a development. By contrast, Mira Nair seems less concerned with specific issues and more concerned with characters, often, but not always, women. If Mira Nair is a more 'popular' director, it is because she chooses to work in ways more associated with popular genre cinema -- particularly genres associated with female audiences, such as romance, family saga, melodrama etc.
Both directors have consistently worked with women in prominent production roles. Not surprisingly, women are very often writers, editors and production designers -- but none of the films mentioned above are photographed by women. Lydia Dean Pilcher has been Mira Nair's producer on most of her films.
Deepa Mehta
This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in philosophy from Delhi University. She started directing aged 40 in Canada and she is best known internationally for her trilogy of films set in India. This ‘elemental trilogy’ deals with issues relevant to women in Indian society. Fire (1996) looks at a marriage in which a young woman discovers that her husband has married her for convenience and she is drawn into a relationship with her sister-in-law.
Earth (1998) concerns the fate of families caught up in the struggles over Indian partition in 1947 in a story seen from the perspective of a young girl and Water (2005) focuses on the fate of a child bride who is widowed and forced to live in a house with other widows in 1930s Benares. An important aspect of Deepa Mehta’s work is her casting of Shabana Azmi, one of Indian Cinema’s leading female stars, who has herself undertaken several campaigns on feminist issues. Another star, Nandita Das appeared in the first two films of the trilogy and would have joined Shabana Azmi if production on Water had not been halted by the disruption caused by Hindu fundamentalist protestors. For more about Water, read the brief review on our associate blog.
Mira Nair
Born in Orissa, Mira Nair also went to North America to train as a documentary filmmaker, basing herself in the US. She began directing in her early twenties, but first came to international attention with Salaam Bombay in 1988, a documentary-drama about streetchildren in Bombay, funded by public and private investors in India, Channel 4 in the UK and a French production company. In 1991 she made Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial affair between the daughter of East African Indian immigrants (played by Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man in the Southern US (played by Denzil Washington). After some less successful films, she finally had a major hit with Monsoon Wedding in 2001, which married the conventions of very different forms of cinema – the loose visual style of European and American Independent Cinema with the intensity of Indian Parallel Cinema and the exuberance of Bollywood.
In 2004 Reese Witherspoon starred in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, which perhaps didn’t get the big audiences it deserved, and in 2006 she directed The Namesake which we will be screening on the course. Again, there is a a brief review of this film on our associate blog.
Although Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have similar backgrounds and are both 'diaspora filmmakers' returning to India to make films, the films themselves look and feel quite different. Deepa Mehta's films might seem to be more concerned with 'issues' and her Indian films have something of the qualities of Indian 'Parallel Cinema', the socially conscious 'alternative cinema' of the 1970s-80s. This makes Water, with its use of music by A. R. Rahman, the leading composer of Indian popular cinema, particularly interesting as a development. By contrast, Mira Nair seems less concerned with specific issues and more concerned with characters, often, but not always, women. If Mira Nair is a more 'popular' director, it is because she chooses to work in ways more associated with popular genre cinema -- particularly genres associated with female audiences, such as romance, family saga, melodrama etc.
Both directors have consistently worked with women in prominent production roles. Not surprisingly, women are very often writers, editors and production designers -- but none of the films mentioned above are photographed by women. Lydia Dean Pilcher has been Mira Nair's producer on most of her films.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Journey
Shruiti Menon as Delilah and Suhasini V. Nair as Kiran in Sancharram (The Journey) (India 2004)In preparation for a Saturday School on Indian Cinema, I came across this film from Kerala in South India, directed by Ligy J. Pullappally. It is partly derived from a real life incident in Kerala when two young women students at university fell in love but were sent back to their parents. The next day, one of the women committed suicide. Recognising elements in the news story that had been in her earlier short film, Ligy Pullappally set out to write a feature-length script which would offer a more positive narrative for lesbian relationships in India involving young women expected to marry according to family customs.
The Journey follows a higher profile film, Fire (1996), directed by the Canadian-based Indian director Deepa Mehta. This film featured major stars of Indian 'parallel cinema', including the central couple, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, and received a significant international release as well as raising controversy in India for what were seen in some quarters as attacks on the institution of marriage (the two women are sisters-in-law). By contrast, The Journey is a low budget feature with relatively little international distribution. I rented the film via the Guardian's rental service 'Sofa Cinema' and discovered that it is distributed on DVD in the UK by Millivres Multimedia, a company specialising in gay and lesbian films.
Like Deepa Mehta, Ligy Pullappally was born in India but then moved to North America (Chicago) where she eventually became a 'public interest lawyer'. She used some prize money to allow her to develop her interest in filmmaking and returned to Kerala to make The Journey –– which received support from the the state's film commission. Technically, The Journey is an example of 'diaspora filmmaking'. Gurinder Chadha with Bride and Prejudice and Mira Nair with a string of films (including The Namesake to be screened on this course) are further examples. Trained in the West, these women have each offered different perspectives on Indian culture and on concepts of Indian Cinema.
Although Ligy Pullappally is relatively inexperienced as a filmmaker, The Journey bears comparison with other films made in Kerala as 'independent' or 'art' films. There is a popular film industry in Kerala making comedies and action films in the regional language Malayalam, but the art cinema of Kerala also has a strong reputation in India -- and in the case of director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, around the world. Kerala has the highest education achievement levels in India and a relatively good record on social equality -- as well as vying with Bengal in the North East as a cultural centre. This makes the story of The Journey more poignant. Kerala is also unusual in India in having three distinct religious communities co-existing peacefully (on the whole). In the film, one young woman is a Hindu and the other a Christian -- but both feel the power of tradition.
The Journey is a very simple story, but it is told with conviction and the setting (in the hills of Northern Kerala) and the characters are well presented. We may well look at an extract from the film on the course. If you want to know more, there is a useful 'official website'.
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