Screen
adaptations - by neccessity - are condensations of their
source and adapting a book within a screenplay while often
requiring a trust between all the creative parties..
An
usual trust was developed during the hard process of making
Jhumpa Lahiri's novel "The Namesake" - the basis
for Mira Nair's new movie. "The Namesake" is
the story of Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation Indian
American trying to make his own life even as he's bedeviled
by the feeling that he's betraying the way of life his
loving parents have given him. Lahiri's book is written
in straightforward yet lyrical prose. Lahiri's overview
enfolds her characters within the kind of sad everyday
comedy that can reasonably be called Chekhovian, while
still slipping into their heads so easily that we seem
to be breathing along with them.
Lahiri's trust
was developed when she saw how Sooni Taraporevala (screenwriter)]
and Mira were able to draw out moments in the writing
and convert them into scenes and dialogue." There
is, Lahiri said, "a kind of interiority to the way
that book came out," which did not suggest it would
translate easily to the screen.
In
"The Namesake," Lahiri has honored her parents'
experience, and her own. The movie goes beyond the immigrant
experience and is a testimony how literature slips past
national boundaries. It does this by expressing every
person's desire to find our own place in the world and
the guilt we feel about separating ourselves from our
families. Mira Nair's movie has clearly stated that fiction
is the country in which Lahiri has found her home.
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