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Indian
American director Mira Nair's latest venture "The Namesake," is
emerging as one of the best reviewed Indian films ever in the US market
going by a string of positive reviews in the mainline media.
An
adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel, the film was released
Friday in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto and opens
next week in Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Jose,
Seattle, and Vancouver.
Indian American actor Kal Penn too received consistently powerful reviews for his lead performance.
The
New York Times said the film "conveys a palpable sense of people as
living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words
might indicate."
"The story of upwardly mobile immigrants torn
between tradition and modernity as they are absorbed into the American
melting pot has been told in countless movies. This variation is gentle
and compassionate. The longing for roots of these displaced
middle-class Indians lends a soulful undertow to a film conspicuously
lacking in melodrama."
"Its steady, unhurried pace, its
fascination with the rituals of daily life and its deep respect for
characters who are continually evolving lift "The Namesake" above
high-end soap opera. It may lack epic grandeur, but by the end you feel
you know these people well enough to keep in step with their internal
rhythms," it said.
The Los Angeles Times said, "Mira Nair has
repeatedly enacted tales of culture clash in her films but never with
quite as much warmth and thoughtfulness as she brings to "The Namesake."
"Coming
off a botched literary adaptation - the garbled, proto-feminist take on
William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" - she turns her attention
to a novel that is not only more manageably scaled but also, for this
expatriate filmmaker, surely closer to home."
"Despite being
rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism
in favour of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take
the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems,"
it said.
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman said, "When a
director is as humane as Mira Nair, it's easy to think of her gift as
the 'simple' ability to bathe everyone on screen in a glow of
understanding."
"Nair's work is certainly empathic (and also
funny and sexy and rueful), yet watching The Namesake, her moving and
marvellous new cross-cultural family saga, I was struck by the nearly
sculptural skill with which she expresses that spirit."
Variety
said, "Bolstered by Nair's lush visual style and superb performances
from ace Bollywood thesps Irrfan Khan, Tabu and "Harold & Kumar"
star Kal Penn (in his first dramatic lead), Fox Searchlight can expect
above-average arthouse business for this audience-pleasing March
release."
"Penn-who has long seemed one of the brightest and
most likable young comic talents around-shows serious dramatic chops as
he takes us on Nick/Gogol's expansive odyssey from the proverbial
American-Born Confused Desi to a confident young man with a sure sense
of his past, his present and his future," it said.
Newsday said,
Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, "who have lavished
affectionate detail upon this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling
novel, reassert the power of the personal and the specific to speak to
the greatest number of hearts."
"The actors are so engaging and
the settings often so seductive, we pleasurably submit to what is
essentially a two-hour penance for all the hurt and wrongs one has ever
inflicted upon one's parents. "The Namesake" may be the loveliest guilt
trip you will ever take," it said.
Premiere found the film "a
thoroughly engaging, terrifically moving family story that's rich in
beautifully observed and lovingly conveyed human detail."
The
New York Post said, "...this gorgeously designed and photographed movie
artfully depicts the immigrant experience in ways that transcend its
setting, melding Hollywood and Bollywood storytelling techniques to
weave a tale a large audience will relate to."
"Penn's
charismatic, loose-limbed work as the confused Gogol helps Nair avoid
the earnestness that afflicts so many films of this kind, and he's
quite capable of handling the big dramatic moments as well. You don't
have to be Indian to love "The Namesake," it said.
New York
Daily News found the film "suffused with radiant grace, and manages to
be old-fashioned yet immediate, epic and intimate."
And
"metroblog: movies" called it "a labour of love by a talented
filmmaker; if only Nair had adopted a less-is-more approach to her
adaptation, her very good film might have been a great one."
Indo-Asian News Service
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