The Namesake

Identities and names, family ties and cross-cultural accretions, the old and the new: Mira Nair turns Jhumpa Lahiri8217;s gentle, evocative novel The Namesake, into a gentle, evocative film.

Ashoke Ganguli Irrfan comes back to India from the US, where he8217;s got himself a nice dollar-paying job, looking for a bride. He sits stiffly in his future in-laws8217; drawing room, stealing glances at Ashima Tabu, who has already checked him out. She has stopped short at the door, put her feet into his Made in US shoes, and walked a few experimental steps. This is one of those stayer scenes from Nair8217;s film, which telescopes a lot of Lahiri8217;s words in two hours and some: Ashima is ready, to fly away, to another land, for a life-time with a man she has met only once.

The loneliness of the new bride, and the couple8217;s slow assimilation into an alien land is instantly recognisable. So is their journey, as they experience the birth of son Gogol Kal Penn, and a daughter who comes along next, and their ownership of the American Dream. As are the little touches strewn through the film: from the very Bengali marriage of Ashoke and Ashima in sweltering Calcutta, to the dilution of tradition and ceremony in Amereeka, shored by the communal activity in suburban kitchens, the consumption of huge quantities of samosas and chicken curry, and the conviction that they have done the right thing by their children.

In this country, Ashoke tells his son, you can become anything you want. The heart of the film lies with Gogol, an Indian born in America, wanting desperately to belong. What kind of a name is Gogol, baba, asks the young man, who embraces, with adolescent fervour, his bhalo naam good name, and who wishes his daak naam pet name never existed. With the knowing comes a sense of self: finally, Nikhil aka Gogol, or the other way round, knows who he is.

Nair8217;s film talks to us all, because this is a journey we all undertake, as we go past childhood and adolescent markers, hoping that at the end of it all, we will have grown up. Irrfan and Tabu, back together again after Maqbool, prove that screen marriages can feel as real as the ones we live through: the former, terrific in his near pitch perfect Bengali persona, Tabu not so much; she falters with her accent. Kal Penn fits right in flashes of what he is capable of were visible in his earlier movies, especially the uproarious Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, because you suspect that Gogol8217;s dilemmas must have been his.

The solid performances slide over the occasional flaccid or wrong-in-tone scene the newly married Gogol and his Indian-American-Bengali wife, doing a Bollywood jig in a hotel room is not funny, just out-of-synch. You wish, in these parts, that the movie had the same lift that Nair8217;s superb Monsoon Wedding did.

You savour the rest.