BEFORE: Glenne Headly carries over again from "2 Days in the Valley". It's Glenne Headly week here at the Movie Year, she's in all three films on the docket. Too bad she's not around to appreciate it, she passed away in 2017. This is becoming something of a problem here at our main office, too many actors are not available to help do promotion because they're no longer alive. Like for yesterday's film, Danny Aiello died in 2019, Paul Mazursky died in 2014, Louise Fletcher in 2022, and Lawrence Tierney back in 2002. No wonder why our publicity department couldn't arrange any interviews...
Maybe for today's film I can get in touch with Irrfan Khan. What? He died in 2020? Just my luck...
Honestly, I've got no tie-in today, it's not National Hindu Appreciation Month or any kind of Indian national holiday - instead it's Tara Reid's birthday and the anniversary of Alex Trebek dying, which helps me out not at all. But maybe if I can get through two episodes of "The Amazing Race" today the teams will be racing through India - that's the best I can do.
THE PLOT: American-born Gogol, the son of Indian immigrants, wants to fit in among his fellow New Yorkers, despite his family's unwillingness to let go of their traditional ways.
AFTER: Yeah, I'm kind of floundering tonight because I have no frame of reference, I've never been to India and I don't know many (any) people from India, we get Indian take-out food once in a while but really, I'm pretty clueless about their culture. (Man, that garlic naan, though, when it's made right, really good...). I've never seen "Monsoon Wedding" or Mira Nair's other big early hit, "Mississippi Masala", but I watched ONE of her other films earlier this year, and that was "The Reluctant Fundamentalist". (You remember, the film that explained how America's racism after 9/11 just turned Pakistani-Americans into fundamentalist terror leaders, so really, it's all our fault.).
It's a different world with different rules, and just one generation ago, arranged marriages were still quite common, though I imagine there are probably a lot fewer today, especially among Americans of Indian descent. I was listening the other day as a co-worker described how his grandfather had two previous relationships and families, in other words, he left two families and then settled down for a third time. I could only say that nobody ever really understands their grandparents, why they did crazy things like leaving Europe to move to America, or why they married people they didn't really care for, or why they married somebody they cared for, fell out of love and stayed married to them anyway. My grandparents hated each other by the time I knew them, but never split up, slept in separate bedrooms, and stayed together until one of them died - and I can't really decide if that's normal or if it's somehow crazier than breaking up - but people back then considered divorce some kind of failure, and these days it's much more common. Now it's hard to find someone in their 60s who WASN'T married two or three times, and had valid reasons for ending things when they did.
But yeah, it must also be weird to grow up in India and then get married to a person you barely know and move to New York City to be with them and raise a family, leaving your family behind, halfway around the world. It must be weird to not know anybody in your new city except your spouse, and be completely focused on having two kids and raising them and only concerned with feeding the family and doing the laundry. That's very alien to me as well, laundry shouldn't be the focus of your day, laundry should be done in the early hours of the weekend, so you probably fall asleep during the wash cycle and forget to put your clothes in the dryer until you need them to get dressed the next morning, only they're still soaking wet and then you have to wait until halfway through the dryer cycle to be able to put them on and then rush off to work, hoping they dry enough during your commute so you don't feel soggy all day.
I've never had kids so I can't really relate here to the struggles of watching them grow up in a new city or country that means they'll have experiences that are very different from my own. But sure, it happens all the time. Unless of course you choose to live close to your family and where you grew up, which is another choice. Hey, we're all just making everything up as we go along, and everybody's life eventually just becomes a reflection of the sum of their choices over time. When do you pull that trigger and change jobs, or move to another city, or sell your house and go live in a rented trailer somewhere, I don't know, that's up to you, isn't it? I can only think about when I'm going to make some lifestyle changes, and I'm terrible at making changes - I've been in the same house for 19 years now, been at the same job for 30 years, so sure, I realize I'm set in my ways, or stuck or stalled or whatever you want to call it. Somehow I feel like everything has changed over time, and also nothing has changed, if those can both be possible.
Gogol also has to struggle with his identity, because he was born in New York but his parents came from India - and they want to follow both the old ways and the new American ways, trying for some kind of balance between the two. But Gogol is American first, it seems - naturally he rejects anything to do with the old country, but then when he's a teenager his parents take him there, and viewing the Taj Mahal changes his life, and he decides he wants to study architecture. His father also named him after the Russian author Nikolai Gogol, which causes a lot of name-based bullying, enough to get him to change his name to Nikhil for a while, because it sounds more professional, and also "Nick" is a very American-sounding name. (Literally, a "Nick"-name.)
There is a reason that his father named him after Gogol, not just because that was his favorite author - but it takes the majority of the movie for the reason to be revealed, honestly it takes so long that by the time they told me, I no longer cared. It's just not good enough of a reason for his father to NOT tell him straight-away, that's all. But I think maybe I'm being too nitpicky here, because there probably is some universal appeal here - isn't everyone curious about why they were named what they were named? Isn't everyone's story an immigrant story, if you go back far enough? Im really trying to connect with this film, but I'm not sure it's working.
Also starring Kal Penn (last seen in "The Layover"), Tabu (last seen in "Life of Pi"), Irrfan Khan (last seen in "Puzzle"), Jacinda Barrett (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Zuleikha Robinson (last seen in "The Merchant of Venice" (2004)), Brooke Smith (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Sahira Nair, Jagannath Guha, Ruma Guha Thakurta, Sukanya, Tanushree Shankar, Sabyasachi Chakrabarty, Tamal Roy Choudhury, Dhruv Mookerji, Supriya Choudhury, Stuart Rudin (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Heather MacRae (last seen in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask"), Michael Countryman (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Kousik Bhowal, Rupak Ginn (last seen in "The High Note"), Soham Chatterjee, Gargi Mukherjee, Pallavi Shah, Jhumpa Lahiri, Linus Roache (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Josh Grisetti, Justin Rosini, Dan McCabe, Bobby Steggert, B.C. Parikh, Sibani Biswas, Kharaj Mukherjee, Daniel Gerroll (last seen in "Touched With Fire"), Amy Wright (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Jo Yang (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Gretchen Egolf (last seen in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), Baylen Thomas (last seen in "The Beaver"), Jeb Brown, Jessica Blank, Mia Yoo, Benjamin Bauman, Sebastian Roché (last seen in "6 Underground"), Maximiliano Hernandez (last seen in "Warrior"), Partha Chatterjee, Marcus Collins.
RATING: 6 out of 10 summers spent in Calcutta
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