We watched a recent movie called The Namesake last night. We hadn’t heard of it before but the trailer on OnDemand intrigued us enough to give it a try. After he is involved in a train accident while traveling to visit his parents, a man from the Bengal region of India follows a piece of recent advice and goes off to see the world, moving to NYC to study fibre optics. He returns to India long enough for an arranged marriage and brings his new bride back to America. They name their son Gogol, after the Russian author whose book of stories the father was reading at the time of the trainwreck. Bengalis have two names, a pet name and a formal name, and the formal name can take several years to be bestowed. Gogol chooses to use his pet name as a child, but changes his mind as a young adult, thinking that Gogol Ganguli won’t go down so well on college applications.
Gogol is played by Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar and, more recently one of the “contestants” on House). It’s a story of cultural differences and similarities, based on a novel by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Though the movie drags at times, and felt about 20 minutes too long, it is an excellent exploration of Bengali culture, the things people deal with when they choose to move to foreign countries and the cultural confusion their children adopt when they are raised in that foreign country and have little connection with the land of their parents.
The relationship between the parents is especially sweet—it shows how an arranged marriage can work, though the film also shows a counterpoint in another arranged marriage that doesn’t work out so well. Though Gogol’s parents are rarely openly affectionate with each other in public, the depth of their devotion to each other is obvious.
