Mira Nair(Final)

The common threads through all of Mira Nair’s movies are marriage, strong women, and India. Her films tend to all have a happy note with a twang it them that brings you back to reality. To be blunt about it, her movies seem like cultured chick flicks. This is not to say they aren’t good in the eyes of many men, but to be sure her main audience is women.

Of all of her movies Salaam Bombay(Mira Nair, 1988) was probably the closest in resembling her work as a documenter and in this way it is also probably the most different from her other films. It still had many of the elements that make her movies her own though with the portrayal of India and the semi-love story in it but her roots still showed more than they did in other films which seemed to take away from a story line in the film.

The other movies Monsoon Wedding(Mira Nair, 2001) and The Namesake(Mira Nair, 2006) were both very similar in their relation; both in film aspects as well as in the fact that they were done only five years apart from each other. They both dealt with arranged marriage as well as Mira’s home culture and bringing it to life and merging it with the western culture. Her use of English in Monsoon Wedding to help it seem more realistic to what India is like also served a dual purpose to make it more accessible to a western audience. The Namesake involved two main characters, Gogol, and Ashima, his mother. It goes through how Ashima had an arranged marriage and then had to go to New York to start a new life which in turn made Gogol’s cultural identity confusing for him.

Vanity Fair(Mira Nair, 2004), like many of her films had a very strong woman in the lead. Becky Sharp was a very adaptive woman who used her social skills to manipulate others and survive. She falls in love with a soldier who’s fortune gets cut off from him by his family and so she has to end up finding out ways for them to survive. Later she ends up falling in love with another man and going off to India in he very end of the movie with a man she had met before her husband. Throughout the movie there was an interweaving of a subplot and her loving of India and a desire to see it. She meats the king and performs a very exotic Indian dance for him as seen in the picture. In Mark Pfeiffer’s review he does a good job of portraying Becky as well as explaining the Indian lacing to the movie.

Mira Nair was probably my favorite director we’ve studied this semester. Of all the movies we’ve watched in both art of film I and II, I think Monsoon Wedding was one of my favorites. Mira does a wonderful job of making very intricate stories and putting her own culture into them. The mix of her views on marriage as well as women and her own love for India all culminate together and make her movies very much her own.

Coen Bros.

The Coen brothers seemed to dumb down their characters and make the audience feel sorry for them. The characters seemed to all have some mental disorder, whether it was being perpetually stupid or just being a complete sociopath in No Country for Old Men. They also seem to over exaggerate the use of the cultural settings in their films. In Fargo for one, the use of Minnesotan accents was bluntly exaggerated even if it was comical. They do end up making occasional social commentary in their films such as in Raising Arizona and Fargo with them saying that money isn't everything and that family/love mattered more. Also, in Old Country saying that sometimes you need to let go of life and let it happen to find yourself and that you don't realize this until your older even though that commentary just came across as the man being defeated with his life. Their films are definitely linked together more so than some of the other directors and probably because they write their own work.