Out from Gogol's overcoat

Can I recommend The Namesake to you? Not only is it a film featuring some brilliant cinematography and Bangla dialogue, it is also a surprisingly engrossing story about immigrants in America, culture, identity, and all those other things you had to write about in your HSC English exams.

The Namesake (based on a novel by author Jhumpa Lahiri) follows a family of Bengali Indians from their origins in Kolkata to their emigration and settlement in America, beginning in New York. The viewer meets Ashoke Ganguli, a young and bookish Bengali, on a train travelling through the Indian countryside. He strikes up a conversation with an older man who encourages him to travel the world. Ashoke says that is what he thought books were for – to travel without moving an inch. Suddenly, the train derails. When Ashoke wakes up, he is lying amidst the wreckage and clutching a few torn pages of Gogol’s The Overcoat. He lives. He marries a beautiful young woman named Ashima who is a classical singer. They emigrate to New York and have a son. Ashoke names his boy Gogol. From here, we watch Gogol grow into a young man who abandons his dak-nam (pet name) for the more sensible Bengali bhalo-nam (good name) of Nikhil, find love, leave love, and struggle to integrate into American suburbia. It is a life-to-death tale, of sorts, which carries itself pretty well.

The film is, in a way, about names and the power of names. Gogol’s name is a rash decision – in Kolkata, Ashoke says, they would normally consult the family matriarchs, but the American hospital won’t release the family until they have a name for the birth certificate. Ashoke chooses Gogol after Nikolai Gogol, whose book saved Ashoke’s life and led to his marriage to Ashima. As he enters his teenage years, Gogol fights the implications of his name, especially when The Overcoat becomes a homework assignment; instead, he indulges himself in all the hallmarks of American male puberty, including loud guitar music, smoking joints after his graduation, and avoiding his daggy sister, Sonali. The name ‘Gogol’ comes to represent his conflict between his Bengali mother and father and his American adopted homeland. But he never rejects his heritage, rather choosing to distance himself from it until about two thirds of the way through the film, when circumstances demand that he come back to his cultural ways.

At times, Gogol’s character is a little too extreme for me – Kal Penn, who is likeable enough as the awkward teenager, occasionally comes across as petulant and surly when I would have thought a more subtle performance was needed. I thought Ashoke and Ashima were brilliantly acted, though. They are both shy, quiet, but thoughtful. Their relationship is one of little moments and glances. This saves The Namesake from being a story about a young man ‘finding himself’, and turns it instead into a film about husbands and wives, and parents and children. Ashima was especially a character who was beautifully sculpted with barely any dialogue. It is hard not to feel her homesickness as she begins her married life in a tiny flat in New York city, her frustration and slightly broken heart at her son’s rebelliousness, and her loneliness as she approaches her forties.

Director Mira Nair also navigates the obvious contrasts between Kolkata and America with some deftness. The streets of West Bengal are tinted a vague yellow colour (which, funnily enough, is how I remember the natural light in Bangladesh), compared to cold greys and browns in America. Even the cracked and peeling walls of their family home in Kolkata seems more alive than the 70s suburban house they end up living in outside the city in New York. Gogol’s first girlfriend, a peppy young blonde named Maxine, serves as a slightly cringeworthy foil to these images of poverty; Maxine has a home in the lush countryside which pales in comparison to the Ganguli’s first visit to the Taj Mahal, and she makes several cultural blunders across the story (I remember Lorien and I gasping with some horror when Maxine arrives at a Bengali funeral wearing a black tank-top when all the family and friends are wearing kurtas and saris). Yet Nair avoids getting too cutesy about the cross-cultural themes, and there was no joking about difficult accents or different foods.

As I said before, the cinematography and narrative motifs were quite accomplished in The Namesake – there was a focus on ordinary objects and patterns, rather than grand establishing shots or snazzy computer-generated pans. What tied a lot of the film’s periods together was the little moments with the characters, from the moment Ashima tries on her husband-to-be’s American shoes as if she is testing out a new life with him, to her eating a bowl of dry rice flakes (garnished with chilli powder and peanuts) with her hands, to the shifting holographic images the family passes at the American airports. These pictures and perspectives become fluid impasses, visual impressions, shifting understandings.

Combined with an understated but lovely soundtrack, The Namesake would have to be my film for 2007 (so far). It may be slow, but it is certainly worth the effort.