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| Exotic
in Bloom
NEWSDAY |
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Every once in a while, even in these tired times (I mean, of course, the '90s), one bumps into an exciting phenomenon in the making. For instance: It's impossible to meet young director Mira Nair and not feel that one has encountered a splendid original female character in the process of becoming. This was immediately apparent when the incredibly pregnant, 34-year-old Nair floated into the tea room at the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan last summer, ready to talk about her forthcoming movie, Mississippi Massala, wearing this long white kurta –a sort of white shirt embroidered with gold–and these narrow pants called churidar, which means bracelets where she comes from, that fall like bangles around her ankles. And beautiful Indian sandals," I add, since I've been asking her the names of the unusual objects she has on or about her body and these woven shoes look particularly exotic. "Actually, these are Italian!" she laughs. "I think I bought them at Cannes last year." This is the sort of cultural mix-and-match that characterizes Mira Nair, a young director known for such singular projects as the critically acclaimed "Salaam Bombay." She was born in a small town in Orissa, India, in 1957, which she did not leave until the age of 15, when she went to an Irish Catholic missionary school and then to Delhi University, "ostensibly to study Indian sociology," where she became involved in theater. She then performed for three years as an actress in a Delhi amateur company. Among the directors she worked with was Barry John (a disciple of Peter Brook), whom she views as an early influence along with Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theater in New York. In 1976, she came to Harvard as an undergraduate, where she soon discovered filmmaking. Initially drawn to nonfiction, she made four documentaries, all based in India, before her breakthrough feature, Salaam Bombay, which was the hit of the 1988 Cannes film festival. An odd and powerful documentary-style fiction about the small boys of India who beg for their living, Salaam Bombay won the Camera d'Or at Cannes and was eventually nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. From the streets of the East for "Salaam Bombay" to the suburbs and countryside of the American South for her new film, Mississippi Masala, opening Wednesday, was Mira Nair's next leap across the cultural divide. And this time Nair is working on a much larger scale, with an interracial love story shot in two countries that includes 76 speaking parts and a Hollywood star, Denzel Washington. But Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Massala have more mutual themes than is immediately apparent. "If I were to find a common thread in my work," Nair explains, "I would have to admit that I have always been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society - on the edge, or outside, learning the language of being in-between, always dealing with the question: What, and where, is home?" Despite the international success of Salaam Bombay! it was difficult to find backing for Mississippi Masala. Finally, with money from several countries, Nair managed it on a modest budget. "What I call making an epic on a peanut," she says. "After the success of Salaam Bombay, and close to nine months of fairly relentless promotion of it all over the world - what in independent film circles we call the 'rape-and-pillage' tour -I was invited by a number of independent financiers and Hollywood studio executives to pitch ideas for my next project. I had been drawn to the idea of making a film that dealt in some way with the hierarchy of color, a film about an interracial love story, but I was reminded time and again that films of this sort don't make money. I got so used to rejection of this kind that I felt I must be doing something right." Mississippi Masala, an artfully constructed sociological treatise on ethnic melange, is a witty comedy of manners and also a steamy biracial love story. The story takes place in rural Mississippi where, for the last couple of decades, entire Indian familes have run motels, co-existing in a peculiar fashion with southern whites and blacks. The conceit of the title, masala, refers to the Indian dish which is a mixture of hot spices of different colors. The main character, Mina (newcomer Sarita Choudhury), is Indian but from Uganda via England, so she already thinks of herself as a sort of masala when she falls in love - to her family's dismay and panic - with an African-American native of Mississippi (Denzel Washington). IF THIS SOUNDS complicated, it is. But the engaging juxtapositions generated by the characters' multifarious origins wind up as a tapestry that is only a background for a love story. So, finally, what we have is a universal tale of how love enables us to break with the past. In the end, it is Nair's curiously detached attitude toward the material that really makes the movie cool and funny. Is her sympathy with the lovers or with the family? We don't really know. "I'm unsentimental, even though I'm very emotional," she explains. Hers is, finally, a sophisticated and very modem vision, that transcends cultural boundaries. This film is also an exercise on the subject of exile, though it carefully avoids any of the deep probing of pain that this topic almost invariably generates. "But it's emotional," explains Nair. "It has to get into your system. It has to. Exile is like that. And love is like that. It has to get under your skin. Exile is about being haunted. And love is, initially, to me, about being in a stupor. Those are the two themes." What work Mira Nair must have done on herself to be able to make a film that avoids sentimentality and nostalgia, the true refuge of exiles, will not be revealed today. She's too reserved, and this is not the place, I reflect as waiters flutter about, ostensibly to see if we want more tea. Somewhat like her movies, this is someone who seems open but is in fact extremely contained, perhaps to compensate for the fragmentation of her background and for all the years of being an outsider, a foreigner, a woman, a person of color, and yet the beneficiary of education, privilege and now success. Whatever it has cost her to cope with these unmentioned contradictions is not apparent. Instead, she quite cheerfully uses the mix for her own purposes. "Passion. Tradition. Mix It Up," is her subtitle for Mississippi Masala. And, now that the movie is finished, Nair can resume her journey. She gave birth to a baby boy three months ago and moved her household to Kampala where her husband teaches political science. When we met last summer she was closing up her New York apartment and, although the city was her home in the '80s, she seems less inclined to mourn one more exile than excited about going going off to the Venice Film Festival with Mississippi Massala. "Unless I plop off a gondola," explains Nair. "I'm sure I'll be upsetting every gondola in Venice with this lack of gravity!" Next she's set to direct Buddha, a $36 million epic (replacing Bemardo Bertolucci, who was originally signed to direct). Quite a plum, and quite a switch for the director, from the small, personal frame she usually works with. She doesn't have a "career graph" as she puts it, but only intends to work on projects that profoundly engage her. "You have to be constantly informed by something slightly higher than the acte du temps, you know?" she says. "And I don't necessarily mean higher spiritually or whatever, I simply mean whatever makes your heart beat faster." She says that's the way she directs as well. She thinks this is what unites a cast and crew working on a movie. "Because everybody follows your dream-train, and the minute they know this doesn't really matter then it becomes just a job. And this definitely gets on screen, it becomes bland and colorless." One assumes that Mira Nair's dream-train has a powerful locomotive and that she will have a long life of passionate, colorful movies. At least, so I thought as she wafted out of the Stanhope tea room, in her kurta and her churidar and her wonderfully stylish Italian sandals.
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