The Namesake

This clip is a little bit difficult to understand for it involves some pronunciations of Indian names.
The voice of the host Julie Rigg is very nice and magnetic. Enjoy!

From Movie Time, an programme of ABC(Australia Broadcasting Corporation) Radio National

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/movietime/

  
  Julie Rigg



Bengali: 孟加拉人的
Gogol: 果戈理
Overcoat: 《外套》为果戈理中篇小说，讲述一个办公室职员和他的新外套的故事，是批判现实主义文学的代表作品。
Dostoevsky: 陀思妥耶夫斯基
WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an American whose family was originally from northern Europe and is therefore considered to be part of the most powerful group in society;

NOW LET'S START!

General Transcript:

Part 1
After the glorious chaos of her hit file Monsoon Wedding, about an expatriate Bengali family returning for a wedding, Mira Nair wandered off to do a screen adaptation of Vanity Fair.  

With The Namesake, she is back on terrain she knows, with an exploration of emigration, identity and cultural losses. The film is as melancholic and touching as Monsoon Wedding was exuberant. Nair, like Deepa Mehta, is part of the Indian diaspora, living between Indian culture and North American.

 

'I refuse to choose,' Mehta told me once when I asked her about the experience of moving between two such different cultures.

 

But The Namesake, carefully adapted from the best-selling novel of Jhumpa Lahiri, insists that the act of emigration, of moving from the warmth and closeness of a Bengali family to the amenity-filled isolation of the suburban America, inevitably involves loss.

Part 2

It is the story of two generation of one family, the Gangulis. Ashima played with marvellous grace and warmth by the Indian star Tabu, marries Ashoke (Irrfan Khan), who is studying in America. It is an arranged marriage. One of the most touching scenes is watching this young girl impulsively slip her feet into a strange pair of American shoes, outside the door of her parents' sitting room where she is summoned to meet her prospective husband. Later she will stand and recite Wordsworth’s 'Daffodils' to demonstrate her aptitude at English.  

The day after their wedding they fly to wintry New York, and Ashima is alone for the first time in her life, as her husband hurries off to university. This is the land of opportunity, but it is also bleak and impersonal. A trip to the Laundromat becomes an ordeal.

Bengali custom dictates that each child is given a family name, never used by anyone else, and later a formal name. When Ashoke and Ashima's son is born in an American hospital they are under the pressure to name the child immediately, as the American custom. Ashoke calls the baby Gogol, after his favourite author, a book of whose short stories he believes saved his life.

And so Gogol Ganguli is born into an American world, which does not understand his name, or the Bengali customs his parents continue to observe with a group of fellow expatriates.     

The film tells the story of Gogol growing up in this world, and his striving for an American identity. Kal Penn, from Harold and Humar Go To The White Castle is excellent as the teenage and young adult Gogol. It is his first really dramatic role, and in the company of two superb stars of Indian cinema, Tabu and Irrfan Khan (whom we first met in Nair's Salaam Bombay) rises to give a performance nuanced with anger, foolishness, and strength.
 

When Gogol goes to college he changes his name to Nick. He finds a beautiful WASP girlfriend, and falls in love, as much with her privileged family and its sense of ease and entitlement in American society as with the girl herself. He has never gotten around to reading The Overcoat, the Gogol short story which so moved his father, and for which he was named.

But in a sense, he is trying on the luxuriously ready-made American family much as Gogol's clerk tried on the luxurious overcoat he craved.

'We have all come out of Gogol's overcoat,' Ashoke reminds Gogol of Dostoevsky's saying. But it is not till after that Gogol is shocked into a willingness to embrace the Bengali customs he once denied.

   

And these are customs from a culture in which he can never really be at home. The choices he will make in his life, including a semi-arranged marriage with the sophisticated daughter of other Bengali exiles, will not work for him as they have worked for his parents. Gogol comes to understand this, and what he has lost as well as what his parents gave him.

 

Part 3
These are not new themes, but they are important ones and it is a long time since I've seen them treated so eloquently. There is a profound yearning in this film: Gogol's for American acceptance, Ashima's for the life she has left behind. There is no sentiment here, no cute nostalgia. When Gogol and his sister make their annual visits to relatives in Calcutta they are as bewildered as Ashima was when she first came to America. But there is a profound sense of gratitude here, along with recognition of the isolation of immigrants who make that bold leap into modernity.

You may find that some stories in this film are not fully realised: that of Gogol's sister Sonia, for example, or that of his wife Moushumi, an exile from a family of exiles, one who keeps travelling to look for refuge in a romance with a third culture.

 

I can only say that the film is beautifully faithful to the book, and that the characters are so fully realised. I didn't mind that the film leaves us to imagine the rest of their stories. The Namesake will leave you with a respect and gratitude for the courage of all our forbears.