www.02138mag.com

The Company of Mira Nair

by Sean Howe
May/June 2007

Photo by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair has produced a body of sensuous work that investigates heritage, family, class, and love. Although the success of her first feature film, 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, occurred during the cultural studies boom, her impulses seem independent of academic trends. Her own background—Catholic schools in Delhi, Delhi University, and a Harvard scholarship at 19—inspired her to make films about people suspended between cultures. A young Indian-Ugandan woman falls in love with an African-American in the rural South in Mississippi Masala; a servant and upper-caste girl compete for the attentions of a prince in Kama Sutra; a wedding contractor falls for a maid in Monsoon Wedding; and, in her most recent film, The Namesake, a young Bengali-American tries to find his place in New York City. Since imagery, cinematography, and character are so important to Nair’s films—each scene feels like a carefully constructed painting—we asked her to choose some of her favorite shots and ruminate on their significance.

She met us at Mirabai Films, her New York-based production company, where she’s preparing for her next project, an adaptation of Gregory David Robert’s novel, Shantaram, starring Johnny Depp.

The Company of Mira Nair

Mira2

Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Nominated for five awards, including the Oscar and the César. Won three awards, including the Golden Camera at Cannes.

I came from a tradition of political theater in which we worked with non-actors in workshops to create a story and take it out in the streets. All that came to play in making my first feature, Salaam Bombay! We worked with street kids in a church basement in downtown Bombay. Shafiq Syed was actually 15, although because of malnutrition he looked 11. His hands were calloused and cut up—a map of his life that belied the innocence of his face. Part of the story is that Shafiq’s character, Chaipau, falls in love with a young Nepali girl who’s sold as a prostitute in Kamathipura, the red light district of Bombay. This scene is that moment when he first sees her being brought in and seizes upon her. The car is actually moving, and he runs with the car, calling her name. With profits from the film we set up educational centers for street kids, and more than 5,000 street children come through our center annually. So this film—and, specifically this image—have become the anthem of that.*

The Company of Mira Nair

Mira3

Kama Sutra (1996)
Won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography.

The actual Kama Sutra is not what people think it is—a pop-up book of sexual positions. It’s about how to engage all your senses in living your life. And I really wanted to make Kama Sutra “Kama Sutra-ically,” so we studied the ancient text. Her hairstyle was based on designs we saw in the erotic temples in Khajuraho—sometimes it’s phallic, sometimes it’s monumental. I wanted to show how utterly modern the ancient sense of design was. I also like this image because of the way the shape of the hair echoes the pillar.

Sarita Choudhury gave a fiery performance as Meena in Mississippi Masala; for this film she brought maturity and pathos to the role of the queen. In this image, she has just seen her childhood rival—her old servant— being taken as the preferred concubine of her husband. It’s a moment of great humiliation. Her mother-in-law says, “She’s just a concubine, but you are a queen. You have to adjust.” “Adjust” is the word that every Indian woman is fed in large doses.

The Company of Mira Nair

Mira4

Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Nominated for nine awards, including the Golden Globe. Won four awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Monsoon Wedding was supposed to be a meditation on all kinds of love. I wanted to contrast the grand, opulent wedding with a relationship that had no materialism, one that was based on nothing but a flower. The tent-man, Dubey, is looking through the window at the maid Alice (Tilotama Shome), who’s having a private moment of fantasy, dressing in the bride-to-be’s jewels, having her own Bollywood royal fantasy. That sense of play and cavorting is something I subject myself to very often. I guess my films have to have those moments, where people imagine for a second that they’re someone else.

Tilotama Shome, who had never acted before, has such an exquisite dewdrop face. The kind that you don’t see often, like a face from a Satyajit Ray film. When I looked at that face, I wanted to give her scenes that would make it come alive.

The Company of Mira Nair

Mira5

The Namesake (2007)
Nair met the film’s screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala her freshman year.

In our culture, when men and women pay their final respects, we wear white. Maxine, Gogol’s girlfriend, comes to her boyfriend’s father’s wake in sleeveless black, the way one would do in the West. The rituals of death are so different in different cultures. But this frame isn’t just about rituals; it’s also about his girlfriend coming in and, however hard she tries, not feeling like she belongs.

Because we were doing a 30-year saga in two hours, every frame had to mean something. In this scene, which lasts less than a minute, we had to convey Gogol’s incapacity to embrace her, because he’s still in shock about losing his father. Until now, he lived entirely in her world, didn’t want her to be in his world. The rhythm of grief is so peculiar you can’t behave in the normal ways.