"Kama Sutra"
by Mira Nair
Reviewed by Sunil P. Sreedharan
(Editor's intro: Sunil P. Sreedharan, Ph.D., teaches
at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco.)
Although I had been forewarned not to bother viewing Mira Nair's current film "Kama Sutra," by a fellow south Asian expatriate in the Bay Area, I decided to forge ahead and see it with an open mind without any untoward expectations. The San Francisco Chronicle had given it a good review, the"little man" icon was sitting up and applauding, and besides this was aMira Nair film! The acclaimed director of "Salaam Bombay" and "Mississippi Masala," two films that I had greatly enjoyed and appreciated. Well, I amsorry to report that the experience was largely less than satisfying-- a surprisingly poor directorial output from Nair.
First, the positive aspects. The cinematography and settings were gorgeous and vivid, and almost worth the price of admission. The acting was generally very good except, perhaps, for Ramon Tikaram who may have overacted in his sensitive artist-stud role which called more for a Harvey Keitel-kind of performance than that of a brown Stallone. I particularly enjoyed Naveen Andrews who threw himself with abandon into the role of the debauched and lecherous young Rajah, playing it to the hilt. Indira Varmaand Saritha Choudary looked stunning in, and out of their costumes, although the latter wasn't given much of a role to sink her teeth into.Varma seemed largely believable as the naive servant girl who transformedherself into a worldly courtesan in order to revenge the slights she feltfrom dastardly men, and the haughty nobility of the feminine persuasion. The pleasant surprise was Rekha, looking as lovely as ever notwithstanding the Kama Sutra drivel she kept spouting, as the worldly and "liberated" ex-courtesan teacher of the ways-of-love.
The story line was, however, shockingly weak and juvenile in a "Mills & Boon"- romance kind of manner, and the character roles were all caricatures with no substance behind them. This was so unlike Nair's previous films, that I found it very hard to believe that they were fashioned by the same auteur. I couldn't help unfavorably comparing this effort to a similar sort of story line depicted in "Raise the Red Lantern," that marvelous Chinese film by Zhang Yimou which dealt with a woman's tribulations as a junior concubine in a feudal household. As an aside, why is it that the modern crop of Indian art-films fare so poorly when compared to the superb outpouring of magnificent, sweeping epics that have recently sprung from mainland China? Could it be that the south Asian experience has nothing quite like the Cultural Revolution which appears to have indelibly shaped the psyche of the current crop of Chinese directors? But I digress...
What was disappointing to me about "Kama Sutra" was that this movie appeared to be aimed squarely at the Western audience in its exoticizing ofVatsyayana's turgid and tedious compilation of the sexual mores of classical India, which I must admit to have only skimmed through a copy of Alain Danielou's translation. In contrast, Nair's earlier films seemed to have been directed just as much, if not more, to the Indian bourgeoisie, essentially holding a mirror to the underlying racist close-mindedness (Mississippi Masala) and the moral blindness exhibited by many to the shocking poverty of the lower classes (Salaam Bombay). One might wish to give her a benefit of the doubt and suppose that she was only trying to extend these biting observations to the puritanical hypocrisy exhibited by these very same middle classes. However, by weaving her plot around the doings of aristocrats rather than the merchant-class of that time, she seems to be way off the mark. All over south Asia, the fabulously rich and the nobility have always played by their own rules of propriety throughout the centuries, and continue to do so to this very day. Any attempt to hold them to scorn is largely pointless, but then a light-weight, fluffy soft-porn, inconsequential movie might have been Nair's intention all along.
Another attempt may have been to indicate the independence and sexual liberation of the classical Indian woman when compared to these times. This putative approach was, however, done under by the passive nature of the non- courtesan women portrayed, and their fatalistic acceptance of a secondary role in relationships with men. In fact in this portrayal, men come out ahead in all relationships between the sexes then as generally now, with the courtesans faring only a little better than the other women depicted.
I can only lament at the missed opportunities, and wish that Mira Nair had placed as much of an emphasis on the story as she had obviously endeavored with the look of the film. For example, it would have been far more interesting if she had written a satire contrasting todays middle-class puritanical views with the more relaxed sexual mores of those bygone times.
Perhaps with the use of a directorial plot-in-a-plot device as was so ably used in the film version of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," where the actors played parts in both eras, and the story moved back and forth in time with ease. Despite wooden lines like "you belonged to your father before marriage and now you belong to your husband," or words to that effect, she had a germ of an idea there that could have been explored more fully to expose the lack of freedom and choice that most south Asian girls and women live with today, and the harsh consequences they face not-so-infrequently for any transgressions.