Mississippi Masala is neither great nor completely bad. It sort of trundles along at a nice, comfortable, and familiar pace. And that's the problem with Mississippi Masala. The viewer has been down this road before. There is a lot going on in this film: love, lust, broken taboos, humor, and poignancy. Unfortunately, none of these themes are developed to any reasonable or believable extent.
Mississippi Masala is a love story between Demetrius (Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington), a young black man born, raised, and tired of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Mina (newcomer Sarita Choudhury), a younger Indian woman whose family lives and works in a hotel run by an extended family of Indians. They meet quite by accident, fall in lust, and ostensibly in love, break all the cultural and regional taboos, and run away together to parts unknown to do whatever they are going to do (the film doesn't say).
If you haven't guessed it already, I was not impressed with this movie. At least I was not impressed with the young Afro-Asian lovers. The Afro-American aspects of the film--relationships among Demetrius' family, Southern black ways of being, etc.--didn't move me because I know them, lived them, and have seen them before on film. But what did intrigue me was the relationship between Mina's father Jay (Roshan Seth) and his homeland, Uganda.
Jay is an Indian, but only because his parents were Indian. He was born, raised, and educated in Uganda. His closest friend, Okelo, is a black African. Jay has built a reputation as a lawyer defending blacks throughout the country. He and his wife, Kinnu, who is Indian, and a very young Mina are "living large" in Kampala among the "natives." But that comes to an abrupt halt in 1972 when now long-deposed dictator Idi Amin comes to power and decrees that all Indians living in Uganda must leave within 90 days.
Jay abruptly finds out that he had been living in a fantasy world. All his friendships, his life's occupation, and his racial ambivalence smack up against black Uganda's reality: He is a light-skinned Indian who made a living defending "helpless" blacks, who married an Indian (wouldn't think about marrying a black), and whose financial security rests in part on the fact that he is Indian and not black.
This fact really comes home to Jay when he asks Okelo where he could go if he had to leave Uganda. "Uganda is my home," Jay says. "Not anymore," Okelo responds. "Africa is for black Africans." That hurts but lays bare a truth nonetheless: We may all be colored, but we are not all black.
THIS POINT COMES BACK to haunt Mina years later in Greenwood as she struggles with the color line within her Indian enclave and with Demetrius' black world. Mina, you see, is a "darkie." She is an Indian woman who has never been to India, vaguely remembers Uganda, grew up in England, and now lives in Mississippi. She is, culturally speaking, a homeless person, a displaced person.
In her search for identity, she easily accepts the challenge of familiarizing herself in a culture through her romance with Demetrius. However, she runs up against opposition not just from her father, still stung from his homeland's repudiation, but also from the political, social, and emotional fallout from white racism against blacks--the type of racism that bypasses her because, no matter her shade, she is a foreigner who can at least act white in America when it comes to dealing with black people.
Filmmaker Mira Nair (who wrote and produced Salaam Bombay in 1988) undertakes a complex task of revealing how the skewed perspectives of race and reality on a global level can spin out of control in a love relationship between two people--man and woman, father and daughter, and old friends. Her instincts are correct, but she should have focused on a particular relationship and explored it more fully. As it is, the movie is top heavy with unexploited political meaning--meaning that could have transcended the explicit inter-racial commentary of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever.
Mississippi Masala should be seen at least once. But throw out any preconceived notions of what you are going to see. My expectations were too great, so I ended up being disappointed. The acting was good. The plot could have been just as good.
Mississippi Masala. Directed by Mira Nair. Released by Samuel Goldwyn Co., 1992.
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