4.2/5

My wife and I loved the movie and were thoroughly entertained by the cheeky flavor of comedy that pervaded the first few minutes of this crossover. I think Mira Nair is yet to produce her best ever and part of the reason might be that she gets better every time (leaving her first ever aside ofcourse) !

“I had no sense of losing a parent or parent-figure at that time”, said Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of ‘Namesake’ in an interview, sitting along with Mira, “”But I was watching what it was like for my parents to lose those dear to them in another country. More importantly, I was just coming to the age I saw my parents’ friends lose someone close to them to a heart attack and cancer.”

I guess that meant the book was supposed to be in part, a memoir of a person who experiences paternal loss and begins searching for his roots, while standing strong on his context, and in part, an ode to the loss of context that an immigrant experiences as he tries to make home in a foreign land, away from his roots.

Somewhere in the last few scenes of the movie, I feel that Mira Nair might has subtly transformed Gogol’s character to a much more sentimental, reasonably shaken and fragile one than the book originally intended it to be. Although, the brilliant movie maker that she is, she pulled it nicely together by throwing the audience back to a page right in the middle of the book where the Dad and Son take this small little walk to where “there is no where else left to go”. That pleased the reader in me well enough to go “Now THAT is an ending!” because I knew that the book had no cinematic appeal to how it ended and I was wondering what Mira saw fit to conclude this part love story, part melancholy and part ode.

I still think the book had so many elements and layers to it that they could only be felt by going through the pages and feeling the characters or may be, in a Tele serial. Mira probably understood this very well besides the fact that making a movie out a book meant losing some of these layers. So, she must have decided to stick with one or two strong threads that were most relevant to the ending that she foresaw for this more than 90 minute feature film.

It was definitely entertaining, partly moving, partly funny and mostly a wonderful chance for the traveller in each and every one of us that yearns for a chance to connect with distant lands and remote cultures to get away, or atleast to feel the urge to do so, and make a home sowhere out there - quite far from everything else that was ever his/her world.

One other fact that I liked about the making of this movie was how Mira worked closely with Jhumpa and even chose to cast some of her family in India (not to forget - even some of the paintings) in the movie. I think that speaks for what a great friend she can quickly become and how seriously she takes her writers and their vision.

But what this movie made me ask once again was a question that I bore in me all along - If we travelled around & lived long enough abroad, far away from where we gathered our childhood memories, would there ever be a real ‘Home’ that can make the wanderer in us want to rest and find our final peace ?