Bright colours and progressive ideas as Mississippi Masala sees a vivid new restoration, at The Cinematheque starting May 19
Mira Nair’s cult classic, with its spicy story of cross-cultural love and family, has aged well
A young Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury have passion to burn in Mira Nair’s cult classic.
The Cinematheque screens Mississippi Masala May 19 (8:20 pm), May 21 (4 pm), May 27 (8:40 pm), and May 29 (6 pm)
A VIBRANT NEW 4K RESTORATION makes you nostalgic for the kind of progressive, genre-pushing, culture-mashing cinema that was happening in the early 1990s.
Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala still vibrates with passion, and thanks to the new redux, every frame bursts with colour—from the beginning’s lush Ugandan countryside, with its hibiscus and thick green foliage, to America’s Deep South, with its neon signs, and the vivid red, green, and gold hues of saris, diners, and motel lobbies.
Nair started making the 1991 film as the equally brilliant, but totally different, Salaam Bombay! was being nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.
Sarita Choudhury is ravishing as Mina, a westernized 20-something whose parents have fled their privileged lives in Uganda for running a motel in Greenwood, Mississippi. After a fender bender with carpet-cleaner Demetrius (a disarmingly young, warm, and easygoing Denzel Washington, then just an up-and-comer), she falls in clandestine love—a fact that will not please her traditional parents. The chemistry between the two is five-alarm Garam masala.
Nair’s trick is putting you smack into the middle of this place, whether it’s at a back-yard barbecue with Demetrius’s family or a traditional wedding with Mina’s. That ease and familiarity can make you forget the ambitiousness of what Nair pulls off here with difficult subjects: cross-cultural love, the fallout of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s South Asians, and racial tensions and xenophobia in America—just to name a few.
The characters are the opposite of stereotypes—detailed, complicated flesh-and-blood people with complex identities. Watch how Mina keeps having to try to explain where she’s from; one of Demetrius’s buddies assumes she’s Mexican, and his brother can’t seem to calculate how she could be from Africa. (Infamously, financial backers reportedly tried, at one point, to pressure Nair into installing white leads.)
The soundtrack is a perfect masala itself, with Indian and African songs interweaving with Mississippi blues.
At the time, there was nothing else quite like it—and it's hard to think of many films since that have handled cross-cultural love in such a visually exuberant way. See this one on the big screen—and get your '90s film nostalgia on.
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