The problem with only getting 1 month - 4 weeks or 5 if we're lucky - to cover an entire career is that things get left out. Movies, genres, occasionally entire decades are skipped over because (thankfully) many of the amazing female directors we discuss made more than 4 films. In the case of Mira Nair, we're skipping both movies, genres, and decades.
Between Salaam Bombay! in 1988 and Monsoon Wedding in 2001, Mira Nair honed her craft making 5 movies in different genres: a great romantic drama, a short, a Cuban-American romcom, a movie about the Kama Sutra, and a drama about Indian-Americans in the South. Nair also became a professor and Columbia, where she met the student who would eventually write Monsoon Wedding, Sabrina Dhawan. The net effect of the 13 years between her first feature and her big hit was a maturation of character as a director. The motifs Nair explored in Salaam Bombay - tonal balance between comedy and darkness, bright cinematography, exploration of social structures - are put to seemingly completely opposite ends in the lighthearted Monsoon Wedding.
Monsoon Wedding is a Bollywood musical by way of Robert Altman. [More...]
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