Nair does it again.

Namesake (2006) - dir. Mira Nair - 4 stars

The screen adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer-winning novel is cradled to success in Mira Nair's skillful hands. Just like she did in 'Monsoon Wedding,' Nair achieves an excellent balance of giving enough screen time to each of the story's characters, allowing them all to develop, change and grow throughout the film. The issues of identity, family, culture, immigration, and the idea of 'home' all get tackled within the same heart-warming 122 minutes. Amazingly, the film doesn't suffocate by the density of neither issue, as it doesn't focus on the issues themselves, more so on the journey of the characters within these issues. This is a film that must be seen.

My personal reaction to the film was on a family/home perspective. As an immigrant who has lived in the United States and now lives in the UK, I felt a deep connection to the characters who were experiencing a different sort of loneliness. No matter how well we adapt to our new environments and blend into the cultures of our hosts, how much at home do we really feel? Further to that argument, what do we call our 'home?' We don't feel completely at home in our home country, not do we feel at home at our host country. We belong to both worlds and never feel at home in neither. We might convince ourselves that we have completely adapted, but we never fully do. Our kind of people are the chameleons of this world: those who are both happy and sad at the same time.

Yes, the world is going through globalisation and there is such a thing now as a 'world citizen,' but how satisfying is it really to be such a citizen? Our identities are mostly constructed out of a sense of belonging to a certain group, be it familial, national, religious, or otherwise. If we can't define ourselves within the limits of one of these concepts, how can we identify ourselves? And if we truly are world citizens, why do we still crave to identify ourselves within the confines of preset identities- Turkish, Muslim, European, etc. Is it because it's easier or because human nature needs a certain level of comfort that these established identities can provide? Consider the following by Yi-Fu Tuan:

"Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place. By contrast, thinking--especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies--threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home. As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation--of being a unique individual--can be felt as a deep loss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos--to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she (like Mole [in The Wind in the Willows]) will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth."

The film also made me question my relationship with my parents and family back in Turkey. I have been living away from them for so long, I realized how much I've started to grow apart from them. The film was sort of a waking call for me to realize my roots -my family- and pay respect to those people who have worked, sacrificed and died so that I can be here with this knowledge. I owe them my life and I pay them my respects.

This has been a fairly personal review of the film, but it just speaks to the power of the connection this film achieves with its viewers. Nair is a genius who can strike different variations of our hearts' chords within a span of two hours, just like real life can.