I love to read and " The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my all time favorites.
So, naturally i was exteremely excited about seeing this beautiful book translated onto screen and for the Ganguli's world to come alive.
It turned out to be a fabulous movie!
The author must be really proud of Mira Nair because she was able to retain the essence of the book. It must be a very tough task to turn a book into a movie. Every word is important and then to choose and show the right scenes, establish links and also try to touch the hearts of the audience.
What i loved even more about the movie was the use of Bengali. I have seen endless movies where the gujrati or the begali just talk in english making there characters a tade bit artificial. The use of Bengali made the film very real and easy to relate to.
I recently read a blog entry about how it is the little lies that hurt celebreties and not the huge controversies. A similar analogy can be drawn here.
For an avid fan of the book it is the lack of attention to the smaller details of the book that pinch slightly.
It did disturb me that Ashima Ganguli ( played by Tabu) didnt wear a Parrot green sari when she meets Ashok for the first time( It's purple in the movie) or that Ashok Ganguli's shoes are black and white and not brown as in the book.
That Gogol decides to go to Yale first and then makes a decision about being an architect ( it obviously was vice versa in the book) was just weird.
What I didnt like most was the character of Moushmi and the omission of most of Gogol's part in the book. For me it was as much Gogol's story as it was Ashima's ....
What is strange is when people claim that the movie was better than the book!
If you ask me a movie can never be better than the book. All those who think otherwise are just pretending to have read the book...
The following is the quote the book starts with. I would have loved it if they had used it in the film too.
"The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise,
and that to give him any other name was quite out of the question. "
- Nikoloi Gogol, "The Overcoat"
2 comments:
you write LOVELY movie reviews...and yeah, the little lies are the ones that kill...
yup...no movie can out-do the book on which it's based...too sad that in this era we can relate better to what we see than to what we read.
Post a Comment