September 01, 2004
Mira Nair's Vanity FairFilm
Your new film, ''Vanity Fair,'' is based not on the magazine but on the great English novel. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, one of the most conniving heroines in literature. As someone once said of Becky, she is not just a social climber; she's a mountaineer. Becky Sharp was a girl who bucked the system. She didn't like the cards that society gave her. So she created her own deck, and created it at a time when a woman was supposed to sit still in a drawing room and hope a guy was going to come and propose. You grew up in India and set films like ''Salaam Bombay!'' and ''Monsoon Wedding'' there. Were you drawn to Thackeray because he was also born in India? When I was young, I spent summers in Calcutta and worked in political protest theater. And every morning, walking to my theater company, I would pass Thackeray's bungalow. There is still a crooked board there saying, ''William Makepeace Thackeray was born here.'' As an Indian citizen living in New York, do you see the U.S. as a force for good? No. Islamophobia has completely raged in the Western world since 9/11. Americans are only given one very biased point of view about the Islamic faith. You seem to be suggesting that Americans view all Muslims as terrorists. Living in New York, we never felt foreign. After 9/11, we felt foreign.Click here to read the full NYT interview.
A review of the film from the San Francisco Chronicle can be found here, and here is a larger profile of Nair from MSNBC.
Incidentally, rumor has it that Mira Nair has been offerred to direct the next in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
sajit on September 1, 2004 02:45 PM in Film · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
Yes, the Islamophobia is awful - I mean, Bush waited two or three whole days before visiting a mosque and proclaiming "Islam is peace." The two people murdered immediately after 9/11 were not even Muslim, one was a Sikh and the other a Coptic Christian. Compared to the multi-ethnic utopia of India, where at least the 1,000 or so Muslims butchered two years ago were real Muslims.
And the American fear of foreigners is not limited to Muslims. After all, Monsoon Wedding took in only $14 million, but it was only playing in a dozen cities.
I'm wondering if Nair's worldview is influenced by her marriage to Mahmud Mamdani. He is an apologist of radical Islam, who likes to blame the woes of the Muslim world on the usual suspects, America, Israel, whatever. Gotta keep you man happy, Mira.
What a relief! And here I was worrying that someone might go around killing people who looked Muslim.
But if Islamophobia were as rampant as Nair claims it is, wouldn't there be a slightly higher body count? You probably have fewer Muslims dieing from acts of violence in the US than in Pakistan, India, or Nigeria.
You have fewer Muslims in the U.S. than in Pakistan, India, or Nigeria.
But yeah, more communal riots in India.
I did a survey of the reviews of the film, and found a disturbing tendency to focus overly much on Nair's background. Some reviewers seem hung up on the fact that she's Indian...
The whole (long-ish) post is here:
But here is the excerpt where I gripe about this issue in particular:
When reviewing a costume drama directed by a person who is not white (such as Shekhar Kapur with Elizabeth, the Hughes Brothers with From Hell, or, here, Mira Nair's Vanity Fair), there is a strong temptation to comment on the background of the director. In Mira Nair's case this is somewhat appropriate, as Thackeray's birthplace was in Calcutta, and she says in an otherwise uninspired interview with Deborah Solomon that she directly remembers walking past Thackeray's bungalow on her way to "People's Protest Theater" in her college days. She also changes the story at some key points to play up the Indian/Imperial background. The ending especially is a surprising, er, departure from Thackeray. So it's fine and dandy to talk about Nair's Indian-ness, but within limits, and not at the expense of her accuracy and attention to detail to Thackeray's England.
[...snip...]
A final case in point is Phillip Wuntch, of the Dallas Morning News . Wuntch's take as a whole is essentially the party line for people who didn't like the movie -- Nair has softened Becky. But in the midst of saying nothing in particular comes a bit of nastiness:
A little too much identification?! What does that mean?There's the bad odor here, not just of a boys' club (notice how many film reviewers are men!), but of a white boys club in particular. The reason complacent reviewers like Wuntch can't empathize with Becky Sharp (either as villain or as hero), is that they simply can't imagine what it might be like not to be born with the Keys to the Estate. For Nair, they can only quip, "nice try, but your film about social climbers... well, it smacks a little of social climbing, frankly." Give me a break.
Well, it's been over a decade since I have read Vanity Fair, and quite frankly, I can't remember much of it. To my great disappointment, the movie was not very good and for the most banal of reasons: the movie didn't make me care about the characters. Her filming had somehow left a very hollow center to the whole thing. There was no 'there there.' Disappointing. Hope her next movie is better.
riview finds room for a must watch list.