Ray Pride

Mira Nair's "The Namesake" binds Calcutta and New York into a single city of its characters' memory, and scenes in train stations and airports occur throughout. Appropriately, then, when we recently spoke, she was suffering a cold she'd had only since starting to promote her lushly imagined, marvelously acted, sweeping new movie.

A confident adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, written by Nair's "Salaam Bombay!" and "Mississippi Masala" screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, "The Namesake" brims with bright colors and rich textures, and the first image that came to mind after reading the novel, Nair tells me, was "an image of a dusky Bengali beauty against a Mark Rothko painting in a sleek artist's apartment." (While this image did not wind up in the finished film, it influenced the title sequence and the film's poster.) There's a delicious, delicate worldliness to the director's approach, combining the aspirations of two generations of a Bengali family, the couple who came to America, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, and a generation later, their all-American children Gogol and Sonia, of the "Desi" generation of the Indian diaspora. As Ashoke and Ashima, Indian actors Irrfan Khan and Tabu suggest the rectitude of an earlier generation, and later, the melancholy of displacement, and as Gogol, Kal Penn ("Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle") extends the charisma of his comic performances to something deeper, almost profound, about generational and cultural identity. There is heart and humor, comedy and emotion, and a rare, generous sweep to the storytelling of "The Namesake."

When directors draw too overtly from fine-art photography, the result is sometimes inert or showily referential, but Nair and her contributors are onto something here that is fresh and involving, moving across several decades in scenes largely comprised of still frames and using panning and tracking shots rarely. The cumulative effect of these brisk, lovingly designed tableaux, weighted with information and beauty, is of boxes filled with family pictures, glimpses of lives lived, capturing the brilliant bursts of what memory retains.

The massed steel bridges, constructed commonplaces, that soar over both Calcutta (now Kolkota) and New York, along with the way stations of transit, link these histories. The cinematography by Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet," "The Ice Storm") revels in comparison and contrast, vivid textures elevating the framing and thematic elements of Nair's shots. In "The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film," Nair proudly compares the fine-arts photographers who have always influenced her to the shots as they occur in her movie. Only a few examples: shots of suburban life show a gentle influence of William Eggleston and Tina Barney; reflections of figures which shimmer like kanji along airport floors hark back to a recurrent Garry Winogrand example.

Nair's view of the human body is also serenely sensual, including the first lovemaking of the young Ashoke and Ashima, a scene in which hands and bodies twine, and Ashima's feet are seen not curled against his, but against each other: a private self-pleasuring within the shared consummation. The gorgeous, goofy wedding night of their son many years later becomes a bumptious parody of Bollywood numbers, but through the actions of the characters, rather than an imposed perspective by Nair. Hands and feet are key once more, as a woman's neck is in a scene in a chic East Village café, and another shot where a woman seen in long shot drops her dress, revealing her figure and splendid, full derriere, followed a split-second later by the tumble of her thick black hair to below her bare shoulders.

"I like hands and feet," she says, grinning. "Noted," I say. "I've had trouble with my films in India," she says, "and I wanted to find ways around that." Nair also dug deeply into the films of India, including the domestic dramas of the great Ritwak Ghalik, and especially, Satyajit Ray (whom she had met as a young film student). Members of the production consulted his films, she says, wanting to evoke the sense of family and place that is constant in his dramas, but also to recollect "A lot of the early 1970s Bengal that Satyajit Ray filmed, I saw again and again, to make sure I was capturing it correctly. But I also happened to have lived in it, so I knew it wasn't just a scholarly thing. It is fantastic to see [Ray's] work." Equally fantastic is when a student or acolyte becomes a masterful filmmaker in their own right, honoring, enshrining, embellishing, continuing the example of the teachers. "The Namesake" draws from so many recognizable sources yet it is a rich, original and glorious epic that dares you not to love every bursting moment of it.

"The Namesake" opens Friday; "The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film" is from Newmarket Press ($30).

(2007-03-13)

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