By Roger Friedman
September 12th 2006

Of course, “Bonneville” wouldn’t have seemed quite so awful if we hadn’t just come from the second showing of Mira Nair’s gem of a film, “The Namesake.”

You may know Nair’s name from her terrific body of work: “Monsoon Wedding,” “Hysterical Blindness” and “Salaam Bombay!” are among her best.

A couple of years ago she ventured out of her normal territory with Reese Witherspoon in “Vanity Fair” and got slammed, I thought, quite unfairly.

But now Nair is back with an adaptation of a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian writer.

I have to say I’d never heard of this novel and was only slightly aware of the author. But I think that’s the point here. Nair, in her rendering of this story with astonishing beauty and artistry, has done more for advancing contemporary Indian culture in America than any Bollywood production.

“The Namesake” is the story of two young Bengalis who move to the U.S. and start a family. It’s an epic that unfolds over a period of 25 years, but the screenplay is so economic and the makeup so precise that the whole thing works without a wrinkle.

The very talented Tabu, a 30-ish actress of great beauty, plays Ashima, and Irfan Khan is her husband, Ashoke. In any awards season, the pair would deserve an incredible amount of attention and praise, but Fox Searchlight has decided to hold “The Namesake” until March 2007 rather than let the movie get lost in this fall’s coming Oscar battles.

What “The Namesake” is really about, though, is the cultural dislocation that is common to any immigrant story.

Ashima and Ashoke come to the U.S. for opportunity and adventure, but in raising their family, a boy and a girl, they have to struggle with remaining true to their identities.

When their son, named Gogol for the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, starts dating the WASPiest wealthy blonde he can find (Jacinda Barrett), these various dilemmas are brought into the conflict.

But Nair is too smart for making a movie of clichés. The real triumph of “The Namesake” is that it avoids the potential pitfalls of soap operas, and remains — like Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” — an original work that will resonate for a long time to come.