Anna has a different perspective on the film.
Linked by madhat. Join Blogbharti facebook group.The curious thing, I found, about Nair’s film is that it seemed to be a subtle tussle between the story of the wife/mother & the story of the son. Which was the one I was supposed to be guided by? The title of the film implies the son. But - be that as it may - I was drawn to the story of the wife/mother. The son’s story, though touching, was more predictable, while hers was not. Her final claiming of a new, vibrant - yet still respectful - form of widowhood was unexpected & thereby heartening.
For me what remained about the book and film is this comment by Pankaj Mishra at the end of his review in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16837
“This is the melancholy awareness that suffuses Lahiri’s catalogs of desirable things and people. And so while such obvious underdogs as Nazneen and Chanu arouse pity and indignation, an overprivileged immigrant like Ni-khil leaves one with more disturbing feelings: an intimation, such as the one his father once had, of “all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world”; a suspicion that “all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.” It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about “The Overcoat,” called “flaws in the texture of life itself.”