i admire mira nair's films. she clearly loves India and its culture, a fact evident in all of her films i've had the pleasure of seeing. but her real art is showing her passion through so many prisms. vanity fair showed us India from the British home perspective which we usually see from western directors, while salaam bombay showed us modern urban India at its most destitute and triumphant. monsoon wedding introduces to the rapidly expanding Indian middle class, providing us with a far more intimate appreciation of her subjects than we might get calling for tech support for our computers or trying to understand a credit card bill.
kama sutra shows us India through yet another prism. first a prism of history, which she lushly recreates, and then through a prism of sexuality, which she (rightly) brandishes as legacy of a great and ancient culture. perhaps she suggests that the British morality imposed by the empire attempted, with some success, to obscure a vibrant and enthusiastic sexuality. well, if British sex is anything like British food, and Indian sex is like Indian food, she might have a point. curiously, i've been told that if you want to eat good English food in London, go curry.
i don't think that nair's ultimately interested in instructing us on sexual physics, or in telling us an epic melodrama. but through her four characters, she reveals love and sex as they are manifest continuously through the human story. a king imposes himself on his queen (patriarchy and rape), a king demands his coutesan (adultery and carnality), unrequited love (every character, each with a twist), jealousy, shame, sex as love, sex as passion, sex as brutality, and so on. the shades of sex that she reveals through her characters' relations are familiar, and she artfully sketches the nuances in three dimensions, where you rarely see more than one or two in Hollywood tripe. yet, like a good tikka masala, the chicken is familiar, but the colors and the flavor are distinctly and marvelously Indian.
