“The Namesake” - Mira Nair (2006)

The Namesake (2006) begins and ends with a young man reading a book by Gogol while riding on a train. In the intervening two hours the story charts a period of about twenty-eight years covering how the initially-seen young man, Ashoke Ganguli, survives a disastrous train wreck, marries a fellow Bengali Indian woman, and comes to America to study, work, and raise a family. He names his son after Gogol, and much of the film covers the growing up and coming of age of this boy in a world that is so very different from that of his parents.

The general topic of the collision of cultural values and the contrasting ways that people make accommodations to new circumstances and a new culture would be intrinsically interesting in any age, but it is particularly fascinating in today’s globalizing world. The story is based on the popular 2003 novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, a London-born Bengali woman who has resided in the United States since moving there as a child in 1970.

The plot of the film first covers the experiences of Ashoke, how he accepts a family-arranged marriage to his bride, Ashima, and then settles in the New York area as a graduate student and later university academic. Ashoke and Ashima are from educated, upper-class Bengali backgrounds, and they more or less gracefully deal with the dual problems of first getting to know each other and then getting to know the new land that is now their home. Their son, Gogol, however, follows an entirely different path, as he struggles with his own unique identity problems. On the one hand he emerges as a rather typical unruly American teenager, flouting authority and drowning his parent’s house with heavy-metal rock music. But on the other hand, his parents have rather loosely instilled in him an appreciation of their reserved and traditional way of doing things. All in all, though, Gogol is very much an American, and the difference between his parents ways and his own is most evident in the direct way he relates to girls of his own age. First he has a serious love affair with a wealthy young blonde girl, Maxine, and he appears to be headed for marriage with her, until a family crisis rocks his bearings and sidelines the affair. Later he falls in love with and marries a sophisticated Bengali girl, Moushumi, who has an even more modern attitude and lifestyle than he has.

The principal theme of the movie is the struggle for self-identity – and the idea of how one’s name can shape one’s social persona is a central motif of the film. Gogol struggles with his name, which seems ludicrous to his high school classmates, and he denounces his parents for having haphazardly condemned him to a lifetime of derision by giving him that name. But the name is actually something of a literary conceit, since the most famous story of Gogol Ganguli’s namesake, Nikolai Gogol, is “The Overcoat”, and the young Bengali’s troubles are echoed in that original tale, which is contained in the book that is read by Ahoke at the film’s beginning (and also by Gogol Ganguli at the end). In that nineteenth century Russian story the protagonist, Akakiy Akakievich, also has an alliterative and ridiculous-sounding name, and it seems to shadow that character’s own identity crisis and miserable social standing that is the dominant theme of the story.

With such an insightful underpinning and rich cultural mix, along with the pedigrees of the production staff, one would expect this to be masterful film. Unfortunately it is not the case. Mira Nair’s work here continues her wallowing in over-the-top comedy-drama. Her first major film, Salaam Bombay (1988), was a moving and penetrating drama about homeless children living on the streets of Mumbai, and she established herself as a rising star on the world stage of cinema. With her followup film, Mississippi Masala (1991), she added comic touches, but there was still a certain subtlety of expression. But since then, she has succumbed to increasingly sprawling and self-indulgent, comic tapestries that are heavy-handed and quasi-operatic. While The Namesake is superior to the randomly focused Monsoon Wedding (2001), it is a disappointment and continues the drift away from the virtues of Salaam Bombay.

There are a few elements, in particular, that are illustrative of the film’s shortcomings.

• The three relatively explicit sexual scenes in the film (one between Ashoke and Ashima, one with Gogol and Maxine, and one with Gogol and Moushumi) are unconvincing and relatively tasteless. These scenes may have been intended to reflect the feelings of romantic love, but they come across as artificially staged and garish.
• Ashima is one of the major perspectival characters in the movie, but the performance of Bollywood actress Tabu does not sustain the role. In her late thirties, Tabu is unconvincing as the roughly nineteen-year-old bride in the early parts of the film, and, overall, she doesn’t offer a compelling focal point for the narrative. On the other hand the performances of the two principal male leads, Irrfan Khan, as Ashoke, and Kal Penn, as Gogol, are more sturdy and compelling. Penn, who currently serves in the US government administration of President Barack Obama, uncomfortably reminds me of Nicolas Cage and is almost too much to take. But he has the American teenage attitudinal gestures down pat, and his uneasy encounters with a multitude of social cultural norms are among the more interesting segments in the film.
• Some of the scenes of India and the US are picturesque, but many of them appear more like isolated picture postcards than situated elements of a continuous narrative. They do not move the story along towards any foreseeable goals or resolutions.

This is the principal flaw of the story – the fascinating narrative potential is too often swamped by excessive attention to the details of superficial social interactions. Nikolai Gogol’s original short story of self-identity had such an impact on later Russian writers that Dostoyevsky was to remark that “we all come out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”. And in both a literal and a metaphorical way, Ashoke was saved by Gogo’s “Overcoat”. At one point in The Namesake, Ashoke cryptically utters to his son the very same words that Dostoyevsky wrote about Gogol, but without reference or atribution, and tells him that someday he will understand what this means. The film audience may well miss that point. Finally, in the last scene of the film, Gogol Ganguli is seen reading that same story and “coming out” from that “overcoat”, just as his father had. That narrative connection should have been made more effectively, and that iconic final image should have generated a more resonating moment than it does onscreen in The Namesake.
★★½

Dekalog 10: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”

The final episode of Kieslowski’s brilliant Dekalog series, Dekalog 10: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”, is a departure from the general tone and style of the rest of the series. This one is more cynical, almost comic, compared to the others, and there is, for once, an outward-looking glance at the degeneracy of contemporary Polish society at the time. The overall picture of the world is one that is less civilized, less polished, and there are fatalistic overtones to this story, perhaps influenced by the participation of cinematographer Jacek Blawut, who had also photographed the tragedy-laden Dekalog 1: “I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Maybe for this reason the compassionate witness, played by Artur Barcis, who is silently observed in all the other episodes, makes no appearance here.

The story concerns two adult brothers, both of whom are tired of their own perpetually penurious financial circumstances. The older brother, Jerzy, is a possibly out-of-work, lower middle-class family man, and the younger one, Artur, is a semi-destitute punk-rock singer of a group called, “City Dead”. They learn that their reclusive father, with whom they had both been out of contact for years, has just died, and they must attend his funeral and wind up his affairs. In fact the two brothers, whose lifestyles are so different, have, themselves, been out of touch for years, and their father’s death is a chance for them to catch up with each other.

Their father had been an obsessive stamp collector, and when the brothers go to clean out their father’s dingy one-room apartment, they begin to wonder if the extensive stamp collection is worth quite a bit of money. They consult a former philatelist colleague of their father’s, who informs them that the collection might be worth something like a hundred thousand dollars. This shocking and lust-inspiring revelation leads the two brothers down a slippery slope of greed, paranoia, and ultimately mutual mistrust. They try to interact with stamp traders and some of the other former associates of their father, who had famously been known as “Root” in the philately community, to see how they might convert the collection into cash, and they begin to learn why their own father had become so reclusive and suspicious of others: everyone they meet is trying to cheat them out of their potential fortune. Yet it seems that there are no other avenues for them to pursue. They will have to make deals with these shady characters.

Although Jerzy and Artur also become suspicious and conniving, there is evidence from the outset that they are both in over their heads on this venture. This is well-conveyed by the acting performances, which depict the amateurish body language displayed by Jerzy and Artur in the face of their mild-mannered, but ultimately far more sinister, adversaries. As the story evolves through the various ups and downs that the hapless brothers experience in their quest to become rich, it becomes something of a metaphor for the pervasive corruption and loss of faith prevalent in Poland in the dying days of the Communist dictatorship. Artur’s ludicrously over-the-top punk rock lyrics are exemplary. These supposedly anthems of contemporary youthful yearnings represent pure trash-talk: advocating greed, plunder, and self-satisfaction at the expense of all others. Even he doesn’t believe the message of these lyrics, yet young women admire him for them, just the same.

There is also the general issue of what has real value. The stamps are just old pieces of paper that have no intrinsic utility. They only have worth if others in the trading game believe that they can be sold onward to other traders. The two brothers have no idea how this trading game works and no hope of winning at it, especially when there is widespread collusion, cheating, and criminal activity embedded in its very core.

Some reviewers have found this film to be extremely funny and ultimately a clever warning against the greed displayed by Jerzy and Artur, but I don’t see it that way. Greed does triumph in this one, it’s just not the more amateurishly greedy Jerzy and Artur who benefit. The tougher, greedier ones do. But in the end, perhaps the two brothers come to an understanding and comradeship that is worth more than anything money can buy.
★★★½ 

Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

The ninth episode of Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” is one of the best in the series. It is about marital infidelity, which one might have expected to have been the subject of episode 6 (Dekalog 6: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”), but was not. In this story Roman, a successful, thirty-something heart surgeon, visits a colleague friend and learns that his own sexual dysfunction problems are permanent and incurable. He has a beautiful wife, Hanka, and now must come to terms with how, or whether, he is going to live the rest of his life with her.

Roman returns to his wife and hesitantly, but stoically, tells her the grim news. He dolefully offers to do the honorable thing: if she chooses to stay with him, she can start seeing other men. Hanka swears by her love for Roman, but finds the conversation about sex a bit too explicit -- love for her is more than just those kinds of physical aspects.

Nevertheless Roman’s new feelings of inadequacy start eating away at him. He begins to watch his wife’s habits a bit more than he used to. He notices an unusual notebook belonging to some physics student in the glove compartment of his car. He constructs an electronic device to secretly tap his wife’s phone conversations. And finally, he makes copies of the keys to his mother-in-law’s apartment, which is currently vacant while his mother-in-law is away. He suspects that his wife is having trysts with the physics graduate student there.

After awhile all of Romans’ jealous suspicions are confirmed. His wife has a lover, and this has been going on for some time, even before his medical problems. The physics student lover, Mariusz, is shown to be seriously in love with Hanka. But Hanka is now overcome with feelings of concern for her troubled husband and feeling guilty about the affair.

Hanka’s moral crisis concerns how she should manage her love life and how honest she should be with her husband about what has happened. Roman’s crisis concerns his self-image as a man. He wants to avoid being jealous about something that he cannot provide for his wife, but at the same time he cannot hold himself back from finding out the horrible details.

There is a side story in the film that reflects on Roman’s situation. A young patient, Ola, is faced with a potentially risky operation to rectify a heart condition. If she doesn’t have the operation, she will have to abandon her promising career as a classical singer. She asks Dr. Roman what she should do, and he tells her that these operations are usually only performed as a last resort. She nods and says that she only wants to live, not risk death just to acquire fame as an opera singer. Roman then ruefully reflects on the value of a diminished life that cannot reach fulfilment. (Later on in the story, Ola is talked into going ahead with the operation, but, she says thoughtfully to Roman, she will then become “someone else”)

Hanka does break off her affair with Mariusz, but it’s a little late: Roman has spied on her and knows everything. He is shattered by the explicitness of what he sees, and his feelings of hopelessness and oblivion generate thoughts of suicide.

When Hanka faces up to everything and tries to reconcile with Roman, she humbly begs forgiveness and agrees that they should go ahead and adopt a child (thereby affirming concretely that their marriage is forever). At this point, we might expect that the story has reached its dramatic conclusion, but not quite.

Roman, not surprisingly, has not really recovered from his moribund thoughts and insists that they need some time apart in order for him to regain himself. Hanka suggests that he might travel somewhere, but Roman says that he cannot bear to be away and think about leaving his wife alone in the same town with “that physicist”, so it is agreed that Hanka will go on a ski holiday. It turns out, however, that Mariusz, “that physicist”, hasn’t given up on his relationship with Hanka and heads out to the same ski resort to meet her. And Roman’s suicidal thoughts haven’t disappeared, either. This leads to a dramatic conclusion of the film that is one of the most moving in the Dekalog series.

A further comment is in order concerning the camera work of Piotr Sobocinski in this film. It is masterfully carried out with all sorts of inventive and evocative shots that highlight the dramatic elements of the storytelling. This is one of the key features that make this episode stand out.
★★★★

Dekalog 8: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

This episode, Dekalog 8: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.", of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog series squarely addresses the commandment concerning bearing false witness. But like many of the installments of the series, it raises the issue of the relative priorities of moral precepts. This issue was raised most directly in Dekalog 2: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”, and, in fact, that earlier story is explicitly referenced in this episode for comparative purposes.

In this story Zofia is a well-known professor of ethics at the university in Warsaw, and in her large lecture class she challenges her students with moral questions. She lives alone, engages in daily exercises and jogging, chats with other elderly neighbors in the apartment complex, and, all in all, has a well-laid-out and tidy existence. One day, she is visited by an American scholar, Elzbieta, who has previously translated some of Zofia's works into English and who has come to Poland to research those who survived the Jewish Holocaust. Elzbieta asks to attend one of Zofia’s ethic lectures and listens while Zofia asks her students to pose moral dilemmas. One student discusses the moral situation that was presented in Dekalog 2. In that story, a woman queries a doctor whether her seriously ill husband will live or not. If the doctor thinks the husband will live, then the woman will abort her pregnancy that is the result of an affair with a paramour. The doctor realizes that his response has life-or-death consequences. Zofia, who knows that the student drew this example from the “real-life” incident in her apartment complex, points out that in the actual case, the most important result eventuated: the unborn child lived.

Upon hearing Zofia’s response, Elzbieta asks if she can tell another “real-life” story. It concerns a six-year-old Jewish girl who was to be harbored outside the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 by a Catholic couple who were to swear that the girl was Catholic. The child was taken to the home of the would-be foster parents, but at the last minute, the Catholic couple balked, saying that, as good Catholics, they could not commit the sin of lying. In this instance, the child was turned away to face an almost certain death.

Zofia is shaken by this story, and we soon learn why. Elzbieta was that same Jewish child back in 1943 who was turned away, and Zofia, herself, was the young woman who made the moral claim about lying and denied shelter to the child. More than forty years have passed, and it is only now that Zofia learns that the child that she had turned away did indeed survive. So, in fact, Elzbieta has come to accuse Zofia of a moral crime: for the sake of a petty concern about a small lie, Zofia had essentially condemned a young girl to death. This is quite the opposite moral concern that Zofia had just expressed in her classroom – that the saving of a life was paramount.

Could Zofia, who seems like such a benevolent and well-balanced person, have been so heartless forty years earlier? As the two women discuss what happened on that occasion long ago, it is revealed that Zofia did have some moral grounds for doing what she did. She and her husband were working for the underground resistance movement at that time and acted as they did, not simply to avoid lying, but to protect others in the underground.

So, at this point, there is evidence given that seems to provide a full justification of Zofia’s behaviour of that earlier period. Nevertheless, Zofia acknowledges that the decision that she made then was not the correct one. She now accepts that the life of that young child was more important than anything else.

As the two women further discuss their own feelings about morality and what is important, Zofia’s rather sophisticated and enlightened perspective concerning moral action in an immoral universe is revealed. Surprisingly, it turns out that Elzbieta is the truly religious one, and Zofia is not – Zofia doesn’t attend church. Elzbieta initially accused Zofia of being too rigidly attached to moral dogma (by refusing to bear false witness of any kind, even when lives are at stake), but we now see that it is Elzbieta who is the more rigidly moralistic person. In the end, Elzbieta comes to appreciate Zofia’s more humanistic perspective and is mollified. Zofia, in turn, has been able to see how she, herself, has grown from the idealistic person that she had been forty years earlier. Both women have benefited from this encounter and widened their perspectives.

So the principal moral issue in this story is not so much about the priority or importance of the literal truth and more about the relative moral importance of two kinds of actions: a concrete action that would save a single life in the concrete instance versus a political action that might have the probability of saving many more lives. Despite the interesting nature of this moral quandary and the connections with “Dekalog 2", however, the film is diminished by three weaknesses:

• Cinematography. There are extensive hand-held tracking shots of Zofia in closeup that are not smoothly accomplished. Many of the shots, which include pointless zooms and camera movements that almost stalk the characters,, are artificial and not well motivated. Kieslowsky used different cinematographers for most of the episodes in the series, and this has the poorest cinematic execution. Contrast the cinematography here with the superb cinematic realization of the next episode, Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”.
• The dynamics of the narrative are weakened by its dependence on Elzbieta’s verbal account of the events that had happened forty years earlier. These dramatic events are merely recited in the lecture theatre rather than given visual portrayal.
• The key personal interaction, the theatrical chemistry, between Maria Koscialkowska, as Zofia, and Teresa Marczewska, as Elzbieta, is not sufficiently gripping to hold the audience.

Nevertheless Zofia’s confession to Elzbieta still resonatess: “You are right; no ideal is worth more than the life of a child.”
★★★½ 

Dekalog 7: “Thou shalt not steal.”

The seventh episode of Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Dekalog 7: “Thou shalt not steal.”, opens with the sounds of a child’s nightmare-fueled cries from the apartment complex that is the home of the series. These cries offer the clue that this film will not only be about theft, but will also be about the essentiality of a mother’s love. Ania, the crying child, is a six-year-old girl living in a family that includes Stefan, a retired musical instrument maker, his wife, Ewa, the headmistress of a school, and their 22-year-old daughter, Majka, who has just been expelled from the university.

It is evident from the outset that Majka has a tortured relationship with her mother, and it takes some time for the details concerning this family relationship to emerge. Although ostensibly Ania is the daughter of Ewa, it is later revealed that the biological mother is Majka, who gave birth to Ania when she was only sixteen as a result of a clandestine affair with one of her teachers at Ewa’s school. Since Majka was underage, the family arranged for a coverup to keep up appearances. Majka’s mother was announced as Ania’s mother, and falsified medical records certified the legality of that status. Now, six-years-later, Majka wants to reclaim her real daughter, and she intends to do it by kidnaping her. But, Majka asks, “can you steal something that’s yours?”

Majka does manage to spirit Ania away when she is attending a school function and heads off to hook up with Ania’s father, Wojtek, who had apparently been forced out of a teaching job by Majka’s mother six years earlier and now lives in a remote rural house, eking out a living as a toy-maker. Majka apparently wants to run away to Canada with Wojtek and the child, but the first meeting in six years between the two former lovers is not as warm as Majka had hoped. Fearing that Wojtek will betray her to the authorities, Majka flees his cottage, too. She calls her mother and gives her an ultimatum: either give legal permission for her to take Ania with her to Canada, or she will kill herself and Ania, too. The chilling telephone conversation between mother and daughter reveals the depths of contempt that they feel for each other.

This Dekalog episode has more action, more of a conventional plot, than most of others. It is the story of a mother kidnaping her own child from the grandparents and trying to make an escape. These events include a getaway, a desperate search for the fugitives, death threats, and chance encounters – all the conventional ingredients of an adventure. But despite the fact that the plot of this episode has these adventurous elements, there is a narrative weakness, too. Too much backstory information has to be revealed by explanatory conversations. These take place during dialogues between Stefan and Ewa and between Majka and Wojtek. As a consequence, much crucial information is revealed by textual exposition, rather than by visual experience. On the other hand, the acting in the film is exceptional, even by Kieslowski’s high standards. All of the players give outstanding performances, but perhaps the most amazing of all is the resonating performance of the child actress, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, as Ania. But, as with the other Kieslowski efforts, it is not adventure that lies at the heart of the story. The real story in this episode is about Majka and her search for motherhood.

From the very first images, when Majka is seen returning her damaged textbooks to the university office, it is evident that Majka is a person with no self-confidence. She is plain, untalented, and overlooked by everyone. Her mother, Ewa, by contrast, is self-confident, charming, and imperious. Ewa is used to giving orders and manipulating people to get her own way. When she gave birth to Majka, we are told, she learned that she could never have another child, and so she never forgave her daughter for causing this deficiency. Majka’s father, Stefan, is a kindly, but ineffectual, parent – unable to match or counter Ewa’s domineering ways.

So it appears that Majka grew up seeing herself as a loser, unloved and unwanted. Her expulsion from college was undoubtedly just one more event in a long story of failure. In the end, she felt that perhaps Ania was the one person who might love her. After all, Majka is Ania’s natural mother – she has to love Majka. For Majka this was the opportunity to give Ania the kind of mother’s love that she, herself, never received. In this story it was Majka who was the unloved child that needed a mother’s love.

This film suggest to me that perhaps there should be an additional commandment, in addition to “Honour thy father and thy mother”, for this modern age: "Love and forgive your child".
★★★½