Power couple
Director Mira Nair on the long-lasting legacy of MISSISSIPPI MASALA
“IF WE DON'T tell our own stories, no-one else will.” That’s clearly something Mira Nair believes deeply. Because it’s not just a line in her 1991 drama, Mississippi Masala, but a sentiment she expresses and re-emphasises while talking to Empire. The director has been telling her own stories on screen for over three decades in movies like Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding, and of course Mississippi Masala. That movie starred a young, cusp-of-stardom Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury (in her debut role) as lovers in an interracial romance, and it explored ideas about race and home with weight and humour. With the film now joining the esteemed ranks of the Criterion Collection, Empire caught up with Nair to reflect on some of the reasons why it continues to endure.
THE TITLE
A good title can go a long way. And from its alliteration to conveying the mixture of cultures at the heart of the movie, Mississippi Masala is an especially good opening statement. “There’s something incredibly empowering about seeing our own words on marquees,” says Nair. “Now our words are everywhere, but back then it was a very uncommon thing. And I wanted to immediately signal in the title that this was about another world that you think you know, but maybe you don’t know.”
THE BIG THEME
Colourism — discrimination based on skin tone — is still a topic that cinema hasn’t broached very often, but Mississippi Masala is a rare exception to the rule, confronting it head-on throughout. “Being brown, between Black and white, was my experience as a scholarship student from India coming to America when I was 19,” she says. “I was very much visible to both communities, and yet also feeling the invisible lines between us.
I really wanted to explore that.”
THE STAR
Nair cast Washington before he won his first Oscar for Glory. It was a time when decisionmakers were still baulking at the idea of a Black romantic lead. “I had seen him in For Queen And Country, a British independent film which I loved,” recalls Nair. “I had been asked by a studio head, ‘Can’t you make room for a white protagonist?’ I said that I had Denzel already. I was shown the door. And that was a very important meeting for me at the time.”
On set, Washington went above and beyond. “Spike [Lee] and I are old friends and he had warned me that Denzel would never take his shirt off. But lo and behold, we were filming the scene of him fixing his car and he came out from underneath the van with his shirt off. I didn’t even ask him! If there had been Instagram back then, I would have Instagrammed it.”
THE ROMANCE
Mississippi Masala felt monumental not just in its showcasing of South Asian culture, but also in depicting an interracial romance between Washington’s Demetrius and Choudhury’s Mina. “I definitely felt it was breaking new ground. I had never seen it myself on any screen,” Nair says. One particular scene that’s popular among the movie’s fans is a sensual phone conversation between the two lovers. Though apart, the longing is deeply felt.
“It’s about the anonymity of not being seen by the lover,” adds Nair. “You can literally be in whatever you are in, and you can have that almost nakedness of expression, because it’s just you, alone. I’m so happy that that scene keeps getting talked about.”
THE RELEVANCE
Back in 1991, Nair wasn’t always sure that viewers were ready for the world she was depicting on screen. But a visit to London for the film’s publicity tour buoyed her spirits. “Outside [the] Curzon cinema, there were long lines to see this film. And I looked at the lines, and there were just hybrid couples. It was a mixed-race fest. In those days, you really didn’t see that. And I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’m reaching somebody. Maybe I have an audience.’”
It’s an audience that has only grown in
subsequent years. And for Nair, the film’s admission to the Criterion Collection has arrived right on time. “I think it’s a prescient film, but what I also love is that it’s really speaking to young people. They are now waking up to this hybridity, and to this notion of identity and politics, and how we are from many places and we are still who we are. So today, I think it can become almost more of an anthem.”