Mira Nair's last film, "Monsoon Wedding," was not only a lot of fun, it was also a perceptive look at cross-cultural confusion, tracking the travails of an Americanized Indian guy back in Dehli for an arranged marriage. Her latest film, "The Namesake," flips the equation, following a young Calcutta girl who travels to America to be with her engineer husband.
Based on a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Namesake" explores life in a cold, foreign land and how a family comes together to deal with it, something that is both comforting, and constricting for the younger generation, since they have to balance their American identity with their Indian roots.
This sounds like your common immigrant-in-America story — and Nair is a populist director — but it's also more than that. It's an ode to what we take from our parents, and what we leave behind.