They are both lying on their respective beds, with a phone in their ears. His hands fade from the bottom of his shirt, exposing his tender belly. His absence runs through his hair; The camera lowers his feet.
The two characters — Washington’s Demetrius and Chowdhury’s Mina — are miles apart in the scene, nowhere close to touching. Still, the tension is arresting.
“One thing I’m constantly hearing now is that this is one of the sexiest movies ever,” director Mira Nair told CNN with a laugh. “And everyone is unanimous about discussing the phone scene.”
Nair’s “Mississippi Masala,” first released in 1991, became somewhat of a cult classic—but in recent years, it was difficult to actually find a copy of the film. Now, Criterion Collection has released a 4K digital restoration of the film, supervised by Nair and cinematographer Edward Lachman. The film is also in the midst of a national theatrical release, introducing it to new audiences across the country.
The premise of “Mississippi Seasoning” is both simple and complex. At its core, the film is a love story between a young Indian woman born in Uganda and an African-American carpet-cleaner who has never left Mississippi. But Nair uses this love story to draw attention to some difficult realities: alluding to colorism, racism, anti-blackness, classism and xenophobia, while also asking tough questions of humanity and identity.
after all what does It means to be from one place? What is home? What is related? What is race? Somehow, “Mississippi Spice” digs into it all—and does so while deftly avoiding any semblance of preaching.
‘Mississippi Spice’ launched at Harvard
Nair’s own experiences as a student at Harvard University form the basis of the film. His arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts marked the first time he had left India, his home country, and he found himself among the black and white communities at school. Both let her in, but she felt the boundaries between the two. This is how the idea behind “Mississippi seasoning” first grew.
This history sparked Nair’s interests. These Indians left Africa, never knowing India as home, and arrived in Mississippi, one of the centers of the civil rights movement, among African Americans who never knew Africa will be their home.
“What a strange trick of history this could be,” he thought at the time.
Meena’s family is based on Indians who were expelled from Uganda and were working in a Mississippi motel. Throughout the film, Nair uncovers the connection between Mina’s community and Demetrius’ African American ancestry.
Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala – who also wrote two other Nair films, “The Namesake” and “Salaam Bombay!” – Made a month-long trip across the South, staying at an Indian-owned motel and meeting real-life people who would influence the script. He said Nair interviewed thousands of deportees from Uganda and both had also traveled to the East African country to meet some of those who had refused to leave or had started to return.
There is a lot of attention to detail throughout the film. But it touts some of the more sinister elements of its subject, even sporting a few more racist moments for laughs. For example, two frequently encountered racist white characters continue to confuse Indian people with Native Americans, saying things like “send them back to the reservation” – something Nair and Taraporevala experienced during their travels.
Nair said, “Portraying the reality of what we were living in was a lot more fun than anything else, and yet it was a portrait of ignorance and complete oblivion about the reality of the world.”
Professor Urmila Seshagiri at the University of Tennessee Knoxville has taught “Mississippi Spice” in her classes for more than two decades. But before she was a professor, she was an excited college student—the one who had come to Cleveland from Oberlin College to see a film at an art house.
“It was amazing at the time to see an Indian woman as the main character in a feature film,” Seshagiri told CNN.
Months later, she took her parents to see the film as well. It’s been decades, but she remembers the audience in that theater: Black people sat on one side, Indian people on the other.
The film’s Criterion rerelease speaks to its enduring fundamentalism. Seshagiri uses an early moment in the film as an example: when Mina’s family moves from Uganda to Mississippi, their journey is depicted on a map. As the camera travels from Uganda to England, the journey is soundtracked with Indian classical flutes – turning into a blues instrumental reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta. It’s a subtle change, but a spectacular one, she said.
“It really speaks to the film’s insistence that no one is just one thing,” Seshagiri said. “That identities are always plural; they are always mixed, that no one is one thing or the other, authentically or alike.”
That type of nuance is rarely portrayed by Hollywood today. Seshagiri said that even the history of enslaved people in the Americas and the colonial themes of the British Empire put together is deeper – showing that these stories may be closer than they are to history textbooks.
And the film doesn’t shy away from the ugly parts of that relationship either. In one scene, Demetrius from Washington confronts Meena’s father, played by Roshan Seth, after some Indian motel owners boycott his business.
“I know you and your people can come down from here, god knows where else are black as a spade’s ace, and as soon as you get here you start acting white. So with us Behaving like we’re your doormat,” says Washington. He points to his cheek. “I know you and your daughter are not some color from here. I know.”
Other films in the early 1990s asked similar questions.
Nair said, although the film was successful, “nobody, really nobody” wanted to finance it.
Her debut film, “Salaam Bombay!,” was a huge hit at the time – after being anointed with some of the most prestigious awards in cinema, winning the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and earning a nomination for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. . When people heard that she was doing another film, they wanted to meet her, Nair recalls. And he had Denzel Washington.
Yet even the most progressive were hesitant, Nair said, asking him to make room for a white hero.
“I promise all the waiters in this movie will be white,” she would say. They will laugh terrified; She will gossip. And then he will be shown the door.
“They wanted to make (the film) something different than what they were going to be,” Nair told CNN. “So it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy really.”
Eventually, Cinecom, which released “Salaam Bombay!” Bit was financed and distributed. But the budget was strict by Hollywood standards: only $5 million, almost half of what he had asked.
These days, women of color filmmakers and television creators are more common: Issa Rae, Mindy Kaling, Shonda Rhimes, Chloe Zhao and Ava DuVernay are all famous with varying degrees of praise. In the 1990s, however, the filmmaking landscape was still very male, very old school and very white, Seshagiri said. and “Mississippi Spice” — With its dual locales and multi-generational actors from different countries – there’s a lot of opposition to it.
“It was unprecedented for Mira Nair to direct and win international awards for directing feature films,” he added. “I mean, that was incredible.”
The fact that a movie like “Mississippi Masala” even exists is almost a miracle. but the nairs were not working in a vacuum.
Unlike the white majority, Seshagiri said, the film’s release coincided with a breakthrough period in dialogue with each other for films about minority and immigrant communities. Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was preceded by “Mississippi Masala”, followed by Gurinder Chadha’s “Bhaji on the Beach” and Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet”. All movies play in one place.
Seshagiri said, “These films… have actually allowed minority characters to be complex and multifaceted.” “They didn’t have to be representative of a whole bunch of people. And these characters can be funny and they can be sexy, even when they’re experiencing real problems or feeling real pain.”
Other films released in the same year ask similar questions about “Mississippi Spice”. Seshagiri alluded to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” and John Singleton’s “Boys n the Hood”. While they are not immigrant films like Nair’s film, she said they tackle the question of how we associate ourselves with and without families or local and national collectives.
He also condemned the film’s political leanings, particularly the idea that romantic love could somehow overcome the system of oppression and domination.
The film ends on an optimistic note, but it is cautious: Mina and Demetrius, dressed in vaguely “ethnic” clothing, kiss in a field of cotton.
After the actual film ends, the scene takes place in the credits. Seshagiri said that there is no place for that love in the film itself. At that time, there was no world where Mina and Demetrius could live happily ever after.
The question arises: is that love possible within the confines of American society? Is it any different now? This is probably what Mina and Demetrius can hope for.