![]() ![]() The couple then must adjust to their marriage as well as to their new materialistic and cold climate country while living in a modest Queens, N.Y. Ashoke interprets his survival as a miracle and as a clear call for him to leave India for America–remembering that was recommended to him by a fellow passenger moments before the crash and that his favorite Russian author lived outside his homeland for most of his existence.Īfter living alone in America, the aspiring engineer returns to Calcutta in 1977 to take the shy, sweet and beautiful Ashima (Tabu), a trained classical singer, to be his bride in an arranged traditional marriage. He’s reading “The Overcoat.” This incident, the single most impactful thing to ever happen to him, will leave him with nightmares for the rest of his life. It opens with a catastrophic train wreck in the countryside outside Calcutta, in 1974, where the only passenger who survives is the Gogol reading Ashoke (Irfan Khan). What I couldn’t handle as well was how uninvolved I was with this otherwise pleasant ride over a well-traveled road. It never leaves the neighborhood of polished soap opera fare, but it’s uniformly well-acted and presented and its tearjerker moments are not too much that they can’t be handled. Mira Nair (“Salaam Bombay!”/”Mississippi Masala”), an India-born, Manhattan-based director, thickly lays on us the immigrant experience and the travails over assimilation–the all too familiar tale of the upwardly mobile immigrants conflicted between tradition and modernity is played out for all it is worth. The film covers thirty years in the life of the middle-class immigrants, starting from the mid 1970s. It’s based on the 2003 bestseller by Jhumpa Lahiri that tells of one immigrant Bengali family in America, with the focus on the American-born son named Gogol (Kal Penn) and his search for identity in his parents’ adopted country. “The all too familiar tale of the upwardly mobile immigrants conflicted between tradition and modernity is played out for all it is worth.” Nair Fox Searchlight 2006-India-in English, Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles) ![]() ![]() (director: Mira Nair screenwriters: Sooni Taraporevala/based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri cinematographer: Frederick Elmes editor: Allyson Johnson music: Nitin Sawhney cast: Kal Penn (Gogol Ganguli), Tabu (Ashima Ganguli), Irrfan Khan (Ashoke Ganguli), Jacinda Barrett (Maxine), Zuleikha Robinson (Moushumi), Sahira Nair (Sonia Ganguli) Runtime: 122 MPAA Rating: PG-13 producers: Lydia Dean Pilcher/Ms. ![]()
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