Wednesday, 2/26/97
A Past Revisited
Director Mira Nair delves into the past with her upcoming film
"Kama Sutra," a film about the art of love in 16th century
India.
By Brandon Wilson
Daily Bruin Staff
Despite being in the middle of a press tour, director Mira Nair
looks well for someone fresh out of the ring with a nation’s
censors. More importantly, hers was a victorious battle, one that
will enable her newest film "Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love" to be seen
in her homeland of India. Ironically, the first film threatened
with censure in India is the first film since her debut that she
has made in her country.
The controversial reaction didn’t surprise Nair. She was driven
to make "Kama Sutra" to cure some of the ills she witnessed
thriving in contemporary Indian culture.
"My interest in it really started in an attempt to counter the
perversity with which I saw sexuality being treated on our screens
at home and in the West," she says. "Thinking that it was
especially ironic that my own culture has been the one to study
love and treat it very seriously as an art and a skill to be passed
on; so that was the inspiration to make ‘Kama Sutra.’"
"Kama Sutra" is Nair’s fourth feature film in a career that
seems longer than it actually is, considering how distinguished she
has become. She came to international prominence with her debut
feature "Salaam Bombay" (1988), an uncompromising look at the mean
streets of Bombay’s slums through the eyes of an urchin who calls
it home. Winning awards at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination
for Best Foreign Language film, Nair’s film reflected the
background in documentary filmmaking she gained while studying film
at Harvard.
The documentaries Nair made while a student focused on issues of
culture, both trapped and kept within its confines (typically
women), and those removed from their own and submerged in a culture
alien to them, themes she has kept up as a filmmaker.
Her first documentary "Jama Masid Street Journal" (1979)
examined the Muslim community of New Delhi as seen through the eyes
and veils of its women. Her other nonfiction works include "So Far
From India" (1982) about the strain of a long-distance marriage
between an Indian merchant in Manhattan and his wife in India,
"India Cabaret" (1985) an award-winning documentary on female
strippers in Bombay, and "Children of a Desired Sex" (1987), which
chronicles the ways in which the modern convenience of
amniocentesis collides with the traditional premium on male babies
resulting in women who feel pressured to abort their babies when
tests show them to be female.
After "Salaam Bombay," Nair continued making fiction films. With
her second feature "Mississippi Masala" (1991), a look at
interracial love in the New South between an African American man
and an Indian woman, Nair cemented her reputation as a strong and
distinctive voice in world cinema. That voice may have faltered a
bit with the critically-ravaged "The Perez Family" (1995), but the
director has returned with another tale of people reconciling who
they are with what caste society has affixed to them.
Eyebrows may raise at the mention of "Kama Sutra," since the
film draws its title from an ancient and sacred Indian text which
gained popular notoriety in the experimental 1960s as a source of
new sexual feats for daring Westerners to throw themselves into.
Nair was aware of the baggage the text carries in Western minds
and, rather than shrink from it, she decided to meet it head
on.
"I think the film is in essence the Kama Sutra, because the Kama
Sutra means ‘Lessons of Love,’" says the director. "And the film is
about the many faces and the many lessons associated with love,
often ruthless and savage lessons, as well as eternal ones. The
Kama Sutra is a very misunderstood text. It’s a text that everyone
from the ’60s on knows only about the sexual positions when, in
fact, that’s a very minuscule portion of the treatise. So in that
sense, when I named the film ‘Kama Sutra,’ I was aware of the
burden of that misconception, but I think it’s really about time we
get our heads twisted right about it, and this was one way to do
that."
Set in 16th century India, Nair’s film fuses several texts: the
aforementioned Kama Sutra (as well as other sacred and ancient
Indian tomes), plus a short story by Waiida Tabassum called
"Hand-Me-Downs," as well as original material written by Nair in
collaboration with South African playwright Helena Kriel.
The result is the story of Maya (played by newcomer Indira
Varma), a servant girl, and her childhood friendship/adulthood
rivalry with Tara (played by Nair veteran Sarita Choudhury).
Banished after bedding down with Tara’s royal intended, Raj Singh
(played by Naveen Andrews of "The English Patient") before their
wedding, Maya sets out to learn the ways of the Kama Sutra from a
beautiful guru/ex-courtesan, only to fall in love with a passionate
sculptor on her way to becoming Raj Singh’s chief courtesan,
thereby one-upping her higher-class rival Tara a second time.
Nair and Kriel fashioned the script during a five-month period
of collaboration and cohabitation. "It was a very intense, very
intimate, wonderful process," says Nair. "We read not just the Kama
Sutra, but a whole bunch of classics from my country from the 13th
century on. We discovered this unabashed sexuality but also the
complete spiritualism that goes with it, which is actually quite
radical. We took notes on all these texts, which we read for a few
months. Then we plotted a fictitious line-by-line; this would
happen, that would happen, etc. We did 148 scenes, then divided
them up; I took the first five, she took the next five, etc."
As a director, Nair had to not only recreate a bygone era, she
also had to stage a series of love scenes worthy of the classically
erotic text.
"Making a love scene is a delicate balance of choreography and
chemistry," she explains. "The way I handle it is I marinate the
actors in love. I just try to instill a completely trustful
atmosphere so all of us can have the ability to take risks and
sometimes fail. I choreograph the scenes the night before, in my
room with the two actors; and we have lots of laughter, lots of
awkwardness, but in a private situation where we nail it like we
would nail any scene that has to be blocked. The next day, I have a
closed set, but I have a joyful set, not a somber, serious set that
you usually find on a movie with love scenes and everyone walks
around as if they were in mourning. I just create an atmosphere of
ease, and I don’t bludgeon it to death, I don’t do 18 takes of
everything, I take it twice, tops. It’s all been prepared so we all
know what we’re doing. As the day wears on, it all just becomes
completely banal and very normal."
The film has already opened in Singapore to a record-smashing
box office, news which delights Nair. It will be released in India
with only two minutes excised in a landmark decision made by the
Indian Supreme Court. Nair looks forward to presenting the film to
an Indian audience, a group with a natural affinity to the subject
matter.
"I’ve had a few public screenings there," says Nair. "It’s a
very heartening response. The layers on which the film is viewed in
India is much more informed than here. There are lots of references
in the movie which haven’t been explained outright, but a lot of it
is influenced by the tantric belief of male-female union being
linked to the divine, and the whole film is populated with such
imagery. The color palette, the locations, the use of music, all of
it are allusions everyone or most people in India understand. Of
course, the sexuality of the film is new for India and has never
been done quite like this. It’s revolutionary in some ways, and I
think that’s good because it’s about time we portray a situation as
natural and as lacking in artifice or coquettishness as possible.
And in a way that’s hopefully spiritual.
As "Kama Sutra" is poised to open on screens stateside, Nair
returns to her new home in Capetown, South Africa (along with her
husband, a professor at the university, and her 5-year-old son
Zohran). She considers her next projects which include a look at
modern Bombay and the effects of globalization, and perhaps a film
set in South Africa. And while she looks doubtful on any future
return to documentary filmmaking, she is aware that documentary
filmmaking has left a permanent mark on her as a director, no
matter how stylishly she may approach her subjects these days.
"My background (in documentary) gives me an appreciation for
details. I wanted to make not a museum piece on India, nor a
drawing-room drama you had to observe. I wanted to make a
psychological chess game, and details like the animals, enough on
this film to drive me insane, were important because I want you to
smell the place, I want you to be there, I want you to not feel
like you’re just viewing a costume drama. That would’ve been death
for me."
FILM: "Kama Sutra" opens citywide on Friday, February 28.
(Clockwise from bottom) Indira Varma plays Maya and Naveen
Andrews is Raj Singh in "Kama Sutra."
Mira Nair directs a crowd scene in "Kama Sutra: A Tale of
Love."
Maya, played by Indira Varma, is prepared for her first night as
a courtesan to the king, Raj Singh.
(Nair) was driven to make "Kama Sutra" to cure some of the ills
she witnessed thriving in contemporary Indian culture.