Mira Nair: Female Auteur of the Outsider

Paper by Amy Lowe. Viewed on DVD.

That Nair has not become a household word like Hitchcock and Kubrick is a wonder given that she has won so many awards for her films. Like Hitchcock, Nair engages the audience with her adept use of mise-en-scene. Like Kubrick, Nair uses vivid color and has themes of social inequality. And similar to both Hitchcock and Kubrick, Nair has a style unmistakably all her own. In this paper I will argue that Nair is an auteur worthy of admiration for not only does she creates visually stunning films, that have her own unique style, but also films that are thought-provoking. I will be using three films to exemplify her work: Salaam Bombay! (1988), Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), and Vanity Fair (2004).

Mira Nair was born October 15, 1957 in India. At age 16 she studied protest theater in Calcutta and went on to study theater at Delhi University. She attended Harvard on a full scholarship and produced 7 years worth of documentary work combining sociology using cinema-verite techniques. Her first full-feature film, Salaam Bombay!, was cast with real street children whose dialogue was based on their own words. The film won two awards at Cannes says Badt, “it put her on the map of the cinema world, and established the Nair trademark; a sociological view of how groups work combined with slow, sensuous camera takes on every day life” (p.10). She has directed several other successful films including: Mississippi Masala (1991), Monsoon Wedding (2001), and The Namesake (2006). Her last film, Amelia (2009) was not as successful as previous works.

Several qualities combine to make Nair’s direction unique and I think part of it is due to her being a female. Says Zimmerman, “…women see themselves as central in their own lives, and in their films they are the ones in control of the gaze” (p.1458). Badt calls Nair’s gaze, “the loving maternal gaze of the camera” (p.10). Of all of Nair’s films that I have viewed, I am struck by the use of beautiful lighting to enhance the expression on the actors’ faces, and she pays close attention to the eyes and mood of each character. She uses close-ups to capture the expressions and beauty in each face. The camera angles used give the audience a sense of being in the frame with the characters. In Salaam Bombay!, these qualities help the audience feel a part of Krishna’s world in a slum in Mumbai as they do in each of the other films listed, as well.

Besides camera angles, movements and settings, Nair uses vivid colors as part of her storytelling. Frequently, she employs a contrast in color palettes alternating between warm and cool colors. All of her characters and locations have both good and bad tendencies…no one is entirely good or evil, and she uses color to bring out the differences. In Vanity Fair, for example Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) wears bold colors symbolic of her bravado. In Kama Sutra: A tale of Love, Maya (Indira Varma) wears cool colors, when she is performing her duties as courtesan without emotion, and warm colors i.e. red when she is expressing passion. Vivid color is also used in all of Nair’s films to bring life to the movie, she says in her interview with Badt, “I like to amplify every frame with life…it should have that sense of burst of life” (p.15). Nair says she wants her films to burst with life whether they are comedies or tragedies. Additionally, her films feature music, eating, dancing, and celebrations of life and death like weddings and funerals. Her films are also considered sensual. When asked by Badt if she planned it that way Nair responds, “I didn’t think about it that way. That is life. That is how people are” (p.11).

One of Nair’s characters explains life very succinctly. In Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, Maya a beautiful servant is cast out of her village for having sex with the King on his wedding night. She is taken in by a kind teacher of the Kama Sutra, Rasa Devi (Rekha), who allows her to stay in her home. Rasa says to Maya:

You have seen that some men can be like animals. But it is not all men…And since when is woman a helpless animal? Just like men we are awake and filled with longing. Passion remains the spirit behind existence, Maya [maya means illusion]. Nothing will ever change that. It is how we use our passion that is of essence.

One of the most important aspects of Nair’s work as an auteur is a part of her mis-en-scene that goes beyond the authentic costumes, locations and characters into the themes of her stories. Nair’s characters are frequently outsiders, either physically or emotionally, from the main society. In all of her films a central theme of “home” prevails. Nair’s characters move from their homes of origin and grapple with this change throughout the film. In Salaam Bombay!, Krishna’s parents give him to a circus and he runs away to Bombay (Mumbai) to earn money so that he can return home. In Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, Maya is kicked out of her village and returns as the favorite courtesan of the King. She struggles throughout the film with finding her place, her home. In Vanity Fair, Becky is a lower class woman with schemes of upward mobility. She moves many places and in the end we find her in India, a far cry from England where her journey began. Says Bahri about Namesake (which could equally be said about all of Nair’s films), “… [are] on the tussle between the noise and music of globalization and the losses and gains of migration” (p.10).
Friedman asks, “Is home the place from where you have been displaced, or where you are now?” (p. 192).

When aspiring to improve one’s lot in life, especially in a strict caste system like that in the Indian societies of Nair’s films, characters often must leave their homes of origin. Then perhaps as Freidman states, “The body is the home of the heart. Flesh is the body of home” (p. 191).

Nair’s characters wrestle with social mores, norms and customs and often they break them. The stories frequently revolve around how those actions play themselves out.

Nair’s characters are very human with likeable and detestable qualities. They either start out as outsiders or their actions cause them to become outsiders. Somewhere along the way they are betrayed by someone they love and trust. Sometimes, the betrayed becomes the betrayer. Her characters are complex. Says Zimmerman, who helped fund some of Nair’s earlier works through her organization Women Make Movies, about the role of women in films:

….the feminist film movement was very concerned with positive images. It was a way to rebel, a way to offer an alternative to the images of women being projected in the mainstream media. It was about changing the way people see women…Later on, we realized that it was much more complex than just showing positive images. It was important to look at all aspects of women’s lives, both positive and negative, because that is where the complexity lies. (p. 1456)

Nair’s works are often reviewed from a feminist perspective. I think that is in large part due to the fact that she takes on projects with social messages that challenge the status quo. For example, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love was banned in India for 18 months because the Indian government objected to explicit sexual scenes and the social commentary of the film. Nair had to take the matter before India’s Supreme Court to get permission to show the film in her homeland.

In summary, Mira Nair is an auteur who deserves the fame and recognition she has earned by providing audiences an alternative to the usual Hollywood fare. At least we can say that of Nair’s earlier works. However, Vanity Fair lost a lot of Nair’s trademark style. In that film, Nair had little control over the project as she did not write the screenplay nor did she produce it. In fact, the screenwriters and the producer were all males and for the first time we see the typical male themes of violence and gore. Additionally, this film lacks a sense of realism that is typical of Nair’s direction. The story lacks credibility as there are no real challenges and there is a happy ending that doesn’t fit the story. Despite the aspects that take away from the film, the audience knows it is directed by Nair because of the beautiful cinematography, realistic costumes, vivid use of color, music, dancing and shots of India infused into the otherwise nonsensical plot.

In conclusion, Nair is an auteur and her work is relevant because it offers an alternative to typical Hollywood movies, an alternative to how women are depicted in films, and because her movies challenge us to think and perhaps make a difference in the world. Nair sums up her work quite well when she says, “I always looked for models and people and ways that art and people might combine to change the world” (Badt, p. 14).

Works Cited

Salaam Bombay! (1988) M. Nair (Producer). M. Nair and S. Taraporevala (Screenwriters).

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. (1996). M. Nair, C. Baron, and L.D. Pilcher (Producers). M. Nair and H. Kriel (Screenwriters).

Vanity Fair. (2004). J. Day (Producer). J. Fellows, M. Faulk, and M. Skeet (Screenwriters).

Badt, K. L.. I want My Films to Explode with Life An Interview with Mira Nair. Cineaste, Vol. 30, Iss. 1. Winter 2004: 10-15.

Creekmur, C. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. Film Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1. Fall 2005: 49-51. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2005.59.1.49 Accessed 7/20/11.

Deepikika, B. The Namesake: Deepikika Bahri is Touched by Mira Nair’s Vivid Sonorous Account of Immigrant Life in an Adopted City. Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1. Fall 2007: 10-15. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2007.61.1.10 Accessed 7/20/11.

Seshagiri, U. At the Crossroads of Two Empires: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and the Limits of Hybridity. Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2. June 2003: 177-198. John Hopkins University Press.

Sharpe, J. Gender, Nation, and Globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Diwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Vol. 6, No. 1. 2005: 58-61. Indiana University Press.

Zimmerman, D. and Aufder, P. From A to Z: A Conversation on Women’s Filmmaking. Signs, Vol. 30, No. 1. Autumn 2004: 1455-1472. University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431889. Accessed 7/20/11.