The Namesake

In her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, ‘The Namesake’, Mira Nair, director of such gems as ‘Salaam Bombay’, ‘Mississippi Masala’ and ‘Monsoon Wedding’, packs an epic tale of cultural assimilation into a beautifully photographed and extremely moving 122 minutes.

The film begins in 1970s India where we see Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan) reading Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ on a train where he meets a middle-aged fellow passenger who tells him to “pack a pillow and travel the world”. After surviving a sudden crash that follows and a subsequent migration to the US, he comes back to India in 1977 to marry. He and his new bride, Ashima (Tabu), then move to New York in the middle of winter, where she tries her best to adjust to her new frozen and isolated home.

They later give birth to a son (Kal Penn), who they hastily name Gogol, after Ashoke’s favourite Russian author, and then a daughter, Sonia (Sahira Nair). And the story is largely an epic tapestry that moves through time and between India and the US, through the lives of two generations of this Bengali family: the parents still with their largely ‘exiled’ Indian friends, and the children growing up as young middle-class Americans trying to fit in with their contemporaries.

At the heart of the story is identity; Gogol’s struggles with his Bengali heritage and the name that marks him out.

The film is breath-taking, very touching and engaging with delicately observed characters, a great musical score and interspersed moments of humour.