we didn’t get to “sin city” last night–instead we watched “vanity fair” on dvd. as some of you know i have a strong antipathy to mira nair. when asked to explain this i sometimes, in the interests of economy, say only that someone who makes a film like “kamasutra” should and can never be taken seriously again. she is an interesting figure, however: the minority/third world director trying to make it in mainstream hollywood. and it may be interesting to compare her career, and choices, with those of directors like ang lee and wayne wang (to name only two). i’m not going to do that here. i’ll note only that unlike those two nair hasn’t (or hadn’t until “vanity fair”) succeeded in crossing over into the hollywood mainstream–which for such directors may be marked by the making of a marquee film that has nothing to do with their culture of origin (nair’s “the perez family” flopped and i don’t know that it was a marquee film anyway).
i would argue that nair’s career is essentially all about the search for this mainstream crossover and that what differentiates her from someone like lee or wang is her continued deployment of her culture of origin whether it is wholesale in exoticizing trash like “kamasutra” or cynical ethnic-chic like “my big fat monsoon wedding”, or in what may finally have been her ticket to the big time, a big-budget costume extravaganza with a big hollywood star: “vanity fair”.
(by the way, it is interesting how filmmakers who make an art-house/festival sensation set in another culture seem now to be invited to make a harry potter movie. cuaron made the most recent one after “y tu mama tambien”, and nair was offered the next after “monsoon wedding”.)
anyway. “vanity fair”, regardless of financial success, may finally represent a successful crossover for nair. it shows that she can make a crappy costume drama just like the regular folks who usually make crappy costume dramas. but there are of course the trademark, distinguishing nair touches. one has to do with her ideology of herself as a film-maker: i contend that while nair’s instincts (her more successful ones) are crassly commercial she fancies herself as an intellectual who is constantly “critiquing” things. thus “vanity fair” is presented as being, in the spirit of the novel, a critique of 19th century english society but what comes out most strongly in the film is the fetishization of the culture of english aristocracy. (this contradiction is not something unique to nair, of course–almost every such period film with the exception of “barry lyndon” falls into this trap.) it isn’t simply the lavishness with which period details is recreated, it is also a matter of the kind of relationship the camera has with this lavish detail.
the second, and most talked about, nair touch is related here to the first (the gesture at critique): the introduction of indian elements. nair has said that she wanted to highlight the presence of colonialism behind the scenes, and this seems like a worthy move. however, it is difficult to see the elements she does introduce as anything but exoticizing in their effects: the depiction of jos stedley’s indian servant, the indian entertainments at the stedley picnic, dobbin in india, the last scene–all of these work at the level of spectacle rather than critique. i’m sorry, but putting a dark man with kohl-lined eyes and a big white mark across his forehead into a scene doesn’t automatically mean you’re saying something smart about colonialism; especially when your handling of these scenes and images is almost undistinguishable from that in an unselfconscious adaptation of a john masters novel or even “carry on up the khyber”.
the conclusion i reach is that the deployment of indian effects in this film is analogous to the deployment of india in nair’s career as “director in search of crossover”. it is both the thing to overcome and yet, paradoxically, the source of her cachet (and thus must always be kept visible). unfortunately, she is not smart enough as a filmmaker to figure out how to deploy this tension itself as a critical element of her film-making. in her work it finds expression almost entirely in the vocabulary of the exotic.
Haven’t seen “Vanity Fair,” and was fond of but not ecstatic about “Monsoon Wedding.” And I can’t argue with your general criticism of Nair, even as…
…I want to shift back to “Mississippi Masala,” a film that I believe melds very effectively the urge to crossover and to critique. I’m curious about your take. That film’s intercultural romance seems both emblematic and symptomatic (you choose) of the complexities of post-colonial commodification. Or… I think Nair, at least here, illustrates how one might use but also redirect the exoticizing gaze of Hollywood/popular film. (And I think I’d say that Cuaron, of the folks you named, is equally adept at this.)
NOT VERY CLEAR QUICK REACTIONS TO THAT FILM:
In the film, the Indians exploit African-American labor, read “the help” detached from their own complicity in the power dynamics of class and race in America–and detached from their historical experiences (as both economically successful and culturally marginalized group) in Uganda. And in turn the African-Americans have little/no sense of these particular Indians as Africans, as Ugandan; as Americans, they can’t see past race or class as identities divorced from such history.
And it seems damn easy to read each group’s representation as equally, generically, stereotypically exoticized. Look at people eating, which is how Americans best envision ‘other’ people’s differences: we get parallel scenes of hotel family banquet and down-home Southern black cooking. You can imagine a white American audience member getting double the pleasure–they and they are both interesting to watch! Ooh, how unique!
But I think that the generic conventions of the romance conflict set us up to identify with the ‘outsider,’ whether Denzel Washington learning about the Indian community or Sarita Choudhury learning about black folks…. So there’s an effective deployment of the genre and a re-framing of how it affects the audience…
And the disconnections/re-connections of race/ethnicity to separate social & political histories, leading to separations and connections that are confused–a stew, right?–is both a pop-American-film trope and yet rarely so explicitly mapped. The crossover of culture, the crossover into pop-culture and commercial success–these are BOTH mapped; we don’t just get the product of crossover but experience (and have to make sense of) the crossing.
Or, put in another laborious way: the film both illustrates and enacts the ways intercultural conversation is enabled and restricted by a commodified and ahistorical representation of “otherness”.
I think it has its genre and defeats it, too. And as a result, I’ve given Nair lots of credit for subsequent films’ attempts to mediate between the accessible and the politically challenging…. Or at least trying to.
As to the other related point you raise, about the careers of such directors:
Carl Franklin and Miguel Arteta also popped to mind. Arteta moving from “Star Maps” to southern Texas and white trash in “The Good Girl;” Franklin skillfully (if uninterestingly) working out upper-class WASP domestic angst in “One True Thing”….
I bring ’em up but can’t get into comparisons now. But I’m interested and wanted to get it down before I forget.
mike, i haven’t seen “mississipi masala” in ages–not since i wrote a very crappy paper about it in a class with david li in 1996 actually. but here’s what i remember disliking about it:
nair sets up the good indians and the bad indians. the good indians are the central family–the ones who come from elsewhere, the ones who are not racist, so on and so on. it is this family that the mainstream audience–the one that is likewise distinct from the two already present ethnic american communities in the film–is identified with. this family’s problems come from pressures from the bad indians–who are not historicized in any way; but oh, even the bad indians can be good for a few colorful wedding scenes. leaving white people out of it altogether (as in “dirty pretty things”) can be seen both as a liberating move: two ethnic minorities interacting without white mediation. but the troubled relationship between these two communities has a lot to do with both competing for scarce resources in a white dominated society.
but despite these limitations i agree that this may be nair’s best film and there was another career path opening up for her, another possibility of development–instead she made “kamasutra”.
I get you. And if I paid attention to the film again, I might buy in; using it in a class, I was struck at how effectively it made my American students think about race & ethnicity as global (and therefore economic) constructs. But it does have its easy (generic) villains… again, can one be inside a genre and yet not wholly consumed by it? Maybe she doesn’t. I would make the case for Cuaron, for “City of God,” for “Better Luck Tomorrow”….
I am intrigued by the notion of career paths. (And I’ll move on from Nair; you’ve made a good case for criticizing her films in this fashion. However, I would note that I caught a tiny bit of “Kamasutra” and found it cinemaxic: i.e., dull, but perhaps worth me watching surreptitiously late on a Friday evening.) Wayne Wang–much as I liked “Smoke”–seems to me to have made parallel career decisions. I’m a huge fan of some of the early stuff-after “Chan is Missing,” both “Slamdance” and “Eat a Bowl of Tea” suggested how he could/would complicate conventional Hollywood forms and yet continue to produce an alternative, less tidy Whitey cinema. But I find “Joy Luck” abysmal, “Chinese Box” is an eager participant in exoticizing the “oriental female,” and his Hollywood schlock is … schlockety shlock shlock. The possibilities for a challenging adaptation of Mona Simpson’s novel about family, identity, and the American road… well, it could have been a glorious mixing of genres and interpretive possibilities, but instead it was boiled down to wholly-conventional tripe. I said in an earlier thread I didn’t mind when someone picked up a paycheck, but Wang may be the Chinese-American Richard Donner given his willingness to squander talent for mainstream success (of a sort).
Then again, why should we (I) assume the non-white-American will have any different kind of reaction to Hollywood pressures than the white-American does? John Woo and Sam Raimi both have weeded out almost all of their aggressive idiosyncrasies in most of their mainstream productions.
Again, Cuaron might/could be an interesting alternative?
Or maybe seeing just one or two narratives of career development is itself unduly, unfairly reductive….
Spike Lee, for instance, has managed to keep making whatever the hell he wants, with a bump or two here and there. … But, hmmm: Lee also pretty conspicously derides attempts to sell to/reach a “white audience,” or the assumption that such crossover is either necessary or useful. (And he seems to have no worries about either the economics or the aesthetics of disregarding crossover accessibility.)
Yeah, and Wang’s Because of Winn-Dixie was a hack job of the most appalling quality! Yikes, why did I go to see that film? I really liked Monsoon Wedding though I feel intimidated supporting it in the wake of Reynolds’ hyper-intelligent post and Arnab’s cultural connection. I thought it was an overly romanticized melodrama with enough music, color and joy to keep me entertained and moved (the romance between the wedding planner and the house servant was really sweet and the buoyant dance at the end reminded me how resilient we humans are). I didn’t feel as if I walked away from the film knowing more about India, but the polyglot cultures colliding into one another was intriguing to this naive Westerner. I even bought the soundtrack, damnit! Go head, I’ve slapped a target on my back . . . fire away.