Between worlds

Mira Nair, director of the film The Namesake. (Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

The Indo-American characters of The Namesake always seem to be looking out windows, observing the world through a sheet of glass. But out those windows they often see bridges: bridges in Calcutta, and bridges in New York, their similar grey cantilevers and beams offering the possibility that distance can be traversed.

“The state of being an immigrant is living between worlds,” says Mira Nair, the film’s director. “You look outside your window and one day, instead of the Hudson River, you see the Ganges. I wanted the film to have this see-saw between cultures, a seamless see-saw. I literally grew up in this way, walking the streets of New York and the streets of Calcutta.”

Nair’s see-saw is more like a perpetual motion machine: she just got off a plane from Mumbai, spent two days in New York – where she lives when not in Uganda or India – and is now in Toronto to promote The Namesake. The adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel is the follow-up to Nair’s 2001 smash family melodrama Monsoon Wedding, and the less well-received 2004 adaptation of Vanity Fair.

Striking in a deep red sari, her large eyes almost unblinking, Nair comments on the strange quiet of Toronto as compared to her recent sojourns. She was born in a small town in India called Bhubaneswar – she recalls seeing a censored version of Dr. Zhivago at the one local theatre – and attended university in Delhi and at Harvard before becoming a documentary filmmaker. Now 49, Nair has a 15-year-old son with her husband, a sociology professor in Uganda.

She seems to have picked up her child’s teenage intonations, using phrases like “big time” and “totally,” or perhaps she’s unconsciously imitating the boy vernacular of The Namesake’s protagonist, Gogol Ganguli (Kal Penn, best known for the pot-Hoovering comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle). Gogol is the scion of a Bengali couple (played by Bollywood stars Irfan Khan and Tabu) who have relocated – and feel somewhat dislocated – from Calcutta to New York.

The epic covers decades and continents as Gogol grows up, an American kid in an Indian house. Once an adult, he cleaves from his family and his Russian-author-inspired name, too, which was a gift from his father, a scholarly man with great intellectual aspirations for his son. In this version of the universal coming-of-age story, Gogol changes his name, dates WASP women and fails to visit his mother, breaking her heart.

“There are very few films about mothers and sons. Endlessly, there are films about mothers and daughters, but mothers and sons – it ain’t there,” says Nair. She notes that while filming, she thought constantly about her son, and the fraught “push-and-pull” between parents and children. Her favourite scene is where Gogol’s father attempts to explain to his teenaged son why he gave him this weighty name. Gogol, possibly stoned and definitely distracted by rock music, doesn’t listen. The father leaves the room, his story untold.

“We all know this scene. Your son is in a different space, he doesn’t want you there. But the father loves him, and he wants to tell him something important, but he decides not to. He has the patience of the universe, that father,” says Nair. “Only when I became a parent did I realize what trouble I gave my parents. You have no idea until you become a mother or a father what you did to your parents, and what they did for you. But by then, usually, it’s too late.”

Gogol (Kal Penn, right) is entranced by his rich American girlfriend, Maxine (Jacinda Barrett). (Abbot Genser/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Nair’s son, Zohran, who goes to school in Manhattan, pressured her to cast Penn. Penn is the rare Indo-American actor who has a huge teen following in the wake of playing Kumar, a cult hero to stoners everywhere. (Notably, Penn was born Kalpen Suresh Modi, and like Gogol, changed his name to something more American-sounding.)

“Kal was cast because of my son. Zohran said: ‘You have to cast Kal Penn.’ Before bed, he’d say: ‘Tell me, Mama, in the morning, that it’s Kal.’ Like a mantra. There was big-deal domestic pressure,” Nair laughs.

Penn may be known for comedy, but The Namesake is an outsized, ambitious family drama, and he is mostly called upon to play it straight, projecting the unarticulated sadness of a son’s cultural isolation from his parents.

“The rhythm of my cinema is very important to me. The rhythm of The Namesake is kind of an interplay of laughter and sorrow, then back to belly laughter, then audible sobbing,” says Nair. “This is what I noticed in the audiences [that watched the film], more than anything I’ve ever made, that kind of rhythm. You can call it ‘resistance and surrender,’ which is really yoga.”

Nair has called herself a “yogic filmmaker.” A serious practitioner of Iyengar yoga, she brings a teacher to her sets who offers an hour class to anyone interested before shooting each day.

“Kal never did it, but Tabu did, and Irfan. Reese [Witherspoon] did, on Vanity Fair,” says Nair. “The director’s main job is to solve problems, or find solutions. If a problem comes up, you have to approach it from somewhere else. You look at the world literally upside down, like the headstand. You embrace disorientation, which is yoga, and that’s really good training for a director.”

Yoga is the constant that allows Nair to keep her head together while having three homes on three continents, she says. Her time is now divided between commercial films and non-profit work, including Maisha, a Sundance-style lab in Kampala for East African and South Asian filmmakers. The foundation she established in the name of her Oscar-nominated 1988 film Salaam Bombay!, Salaam Baalak Trust, continues to provide support for street kids in several Indian cities.

It’s been 19 years since Nair left documentary making to make Salaam Bombay!, a fictional account of the lives of poor children in Mumbai told with cinéma vérité methods: unobtrusive camera; non-professional actors; the city churning naturally in the background. That film feels a long way off from the sweeping literary adaptation of The Namesake.

“I always try to mesh the real world and the documentary world. The Calcutta sections of The Namesake are totally shot in the same way we shot Salaam Bombay!,” says Nair. “The idea is to provide that bedrock in the reality of India, because that bedrock is infinitely more interesting than fiction for me. I don’t think I’m getting away from documentaries, I’m amalgamating. What’s vital to me is to put life on screen, whichever way I do it.”

The Namesake opens March 9.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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