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| Another
Peek |
By
Lavina Melwani |
| Mira Nair takes a
fresh look at Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. |
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In
life, nothing is ever lost. Not even the
books you read in your languid childhood.
Director Mira Nair pored over William
Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
when she was a schoolgirl and now decades
later, she has reinterpreted that classic
piece of literature in a lush cinematic
saga from Hollywood.
“This story has been one of my
absolute favorite novels,” she says.
“You know many of us have colonial
hangovers in India and we are steeped
in English literature. I went to an Irish
Catholic boarding school in Simla and
studied deeply Shakespeare and Keats and
Vanity Fair was what I read, kind of slightly
under the covers, when I was 16.”
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The studios offered her
the film because of the whopping success
she had with Monsoon Wedding and it was
an added bonus that she knew and loved
the novel.
It is an irony that Thackeray would have
appreciated, that this saga of Imperial
England should be reinterpreted for the
silver screen by a sassy and outspoken
child of the former colony. And he would
have been pleased, because Nair brings
a whole new perspective to this tale of
the Raj.
An independent filmmaker, Nair usually
produces her own work, only going the
studio route when she is offered something
with such a vast canvas that she would
not be able to produce it on her own.
This $23 million movie stars Hollywood
superstar Reese Witherspoon as the beautiful
and calculating Becky Sharp who rises
from rags to the pinnacle of high society.
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also stars an ensemble cast of strong British
talent including Eileen Atkins, Jim Broadbent,
Gabriel Byrne, Romola Garai, Bob Hoskins,
Rhys Ifans, Geraldine McEwan, James Purefoy
and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. |
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“The big thing for me with Vanity
Fair was that I am a helpless fan of Thackeray
really and what I love about him is that
he is almost an outsider in his own society,”
she says. After all, Thackeray was born
in Calcutta and raised in British India
and when he returned to England, he could
see it with a sharper focus, warts and all..
“He always looked at his own society
almost with the same eyes as Becky Sharp
does,” says Nair.
“And he wrote about a time that
was acutely about the relationship between
the Empire and the Colonies, a time I’m
very interested in where England was first
feeling the flush of wealth from what I
call the rape of the colonies and was getting
richer at home as a result.”
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Nair says that while she
was attracted by the relation between the
Empire and the colony, Vanity Fair drew
her because it was this huge banquet saga
with such a vast canvas: “I love the
ensemble casting, I love the layers of the
story, I love that Thackeray had the point
of view to expose the sham and façade
of life.
I love that he asked what I call the yogic
question — ‘Which of us is happy
in the world and when we meet our desire,
are we content?’ That is the essence
of Vanity Fair.”
For Nair the first challenge was bringing
the printed page — 900 of them —
to the movie screen: what do you leave out
and what do you keep? So it was an intense
collaboration with writer Julian Fellowes,
who bagged an Oscar for his work in another
period film, Gosford Park. The two hit it
off instantly. She jokingly calls Fellowes
the champion of cutlery and butlery from
Gosford Park and was a little anxious when
he was coming over to her home for dinner,
preparing Western food too, in case he didn’t
eat Indian. |
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“In
my house we eat with our hands, so I thought
no cutlery to offer this chap! He instantly
chose Indian food and he began to eat with
his hands; we were friends for life!”
Both of them had made their own maps of
the book and then compared notes. Nair says,
“What I wanted was this democratic
swirl — this whole world — and
this inter-relatedness of the characters,
because Thackeray does this brilliantly.
As Julian wrote the screenplay we used to
exchange emails.” In fact, these emailed
messages are now part of a book on the making
of Vanity Fair, showing how the screenplay
took shape.
Says Nair: “For me, the task was
how to amplify the frame, when we had a
scene — how to jam in four or five
other things from the book which otherwise
I wouldn’t get to do entire scenes
of, but to keep the details within each
scene.”
She was not interested in making it an anemic
parlor room drama and wanted to evoke the
outside world, the class culture of that
time: “The shit on the roads, the
pigs on the street, the coal mongers, the
entire army of working class England who
had to support the upper class to make them
look and behave the way they did.
“And I wanted to do that in such a
visceral way that without giving you a lecture,
you would understand, as the audience, that
if Becky made a false move — snakes
and ladders — she would go right back
to where she came from.”
The film is very much about two different
worlds and also encompasses the opulent
world of the upper class with its balls
and finery. Nair brings her energetic and
very visual filmmaking to Vanity Fair, bringing
it alive and giving it glamour with the
many Indian and Oriental touches.
Ask Fellowes about the collaboration with
Mira and how they decided how much of India
to put into the novel and he points out
that there is a lot of Indian influence
in the book, which is usually left out in
other adaptations: “India has become
this sort of other way of doing things,
this freer other society where conceivably
Becky may be more at home and that seems
to me to be legitimate. We didn’t
introduce the Indian theme into the stor,y
but we did sort of reap it, rather.” |
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| So while
the costumes designed by Beatrix Aruna
Pasztor are of the period, they are dipped
in Indian colors with exquisite detailing,
and have almost a theatrical touch. Nair
explains: “Thackeray wrote a very
detailed, almost cinema verite, of his
days. He always referred to the pashmina
shawls, the inlaid marble tables, to the
chinoiserie furniture, to so many illusions
of the Orient, the colonies across the
ocean, and how people coveted this in
England. Again the colonies are such an
important part of Thackeray’s fabric,
no pun intended, that we went with that
— the indigos, the crimsons, the
teals, and the peacocks.”
The wonderful influence of early Indian
cinema and the sassiness of Bollywood are
always present in Nair’s work and
Vanity Fair has three dramatic song numbers
and a wonderful sexy harem dance where Becky
performs before the King. In the book it
was a game of charades in which Becky played
a slave girl, but Nair felt that this in-your-face
dance number, choreographed by Bollywood’s
Farah Khan, would convey the same shock
value more powerfully.
Laughs Nair, “It’s much more
cinematic and we have this lovely Indian
expression on the street, Paisa Vasool,
which means, ‘I’ve got to
give you your money’s worth.’
Give you a treat or sorry, we haven’t
delivered. And I always like to give you
paisa vasool.”
In the ultimate paisa vasool, Nair also
gives cinemagoers a rich eyeful, taking
Becky to India, to all the color and pageantry
of Royal Rajasthan. While this is not
in the book, it seems just what the exuberant
and adventure-hungry Becky Sharp would
want, and enhances the cinematic experience.
What’s next for Nair? As usual,
she has several projects cooking, one
being preparing Monsoon Wedding in a big,
flashy musical for Broadway. Sabrina Dhawan
is already writing the script and it will
probably be ready around Fall 2005. She’s
also directing a film version of Tony
Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul for HBO,
with Sooni Tareporewala writing the screenplay.
Another big venture from Nair will be
the film version of Jhumpa Lahiri’s
The Namesake: “I’ve fallen
in love with that so I’m going to
do that very quickly, right away, before
doing Homebody.” |
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Always encouraging of new
filmmakers, she has established an annual
filmmaker’s laboratory, Maisha,
in East Africa and India. The first lab,
with an emphasis on screenwriting, is
planned for August 2005 in Kampala, Uganda.
She’s also launched International
Bhenji Brigade (IBB), a partnership with
Bala Entertainment International and Venkateshwara
Hatcheries to bring the work of young
filmmakers to the screen. |
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She says:
“To date we’ve had 56 scripts
offered, because there are people just
writing and writing and wanting their
voices to be heard.”
Always outspoken, she says she made Monsoon
Wedding on so little money “purposely
to prove that you don’t need a whole
lot of money and men in suits to tell
you how to make a good movie.”
She recalls a time when she got a grant
to make her very first documentary So
Far From Home and the other grantees were
overwhelmed with gratitude for being given
the funds. She told them, “You know,
we have such a voice to say, to speak
in this world, you shouldn’t just
be grateful. The other people should also
be grateful to you for bringing your own
voice to the world.”
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She adds, for the benefit
of those embarking on the same journey:
“So I must tell you that I don’t
sit around looking over my shoulder, hoping
that they won’t catch me or something.
I think it’s the other way around.
I think I have something to say and I have
a point of view on the world that I have
to offer, and I’d like to open your
eyes to that part of the world that I come
from. It’s not gratitude, it’s
a two way process.”
And in this give and take, in this two
way process, Mira Nair has brought her own
perspective to Vanity Fair, the ultimate
tale of high and low society, adding in
unique shadings and nuances, redolent of
her own Indian background, to enhance the
larger picture.
After all, India was an invisible but powerful
presence running through 19th century England
— and Mira Nair has underscored that
in her retelling. |
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End Of Article..... |
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