Mississippi Masala

This week we watched Mississippi Masala in class. This movie was about an Indian girl named Mina living in Uganda with her family who flees to America due to dictator Idi Amin. Years later Mina falls in love with an African American man named Demetrius, and the film explores the racial tensions between their respective families. The unique thing about this movie was that instead of focusing on the relationship between a member of a majority race and a minority race, or between two people of the same race, it focuses on the relationship between two people of color from different racial backgrounds. This is something that I do not often see, especially in a movie featuring a big name actor like Denzel Washington. Although Mina and Demetrius were in love, their Indian American and African American families could not reconcile the differences between them and would not let them be together, eventually driving the two to be angry toward one another as well. Ind the end, Mina and Demetrius decide that although their families are important to them, they are adults who can choose who is right for them and decide to be together despite the objections that others may have about the interracial couple. While I thought the premise was interesting, I didn’t enjoy the film as much as some of the others we have watched this quarter. For the first third of the film the tone seemed all over the place and I couldn’t tell it it was supposed to be a drama or a comedy. After a while the movie settled into a fairly generic romantic comedy formula that wasn’t especially funny to me. Nevertheless it was refreshing to see a Hollywood movie centered around Indian Americans, a group that seems underrepresented even among Asian Americans, especially in the early 1990s when it was released. At that time Apu from The Simpsons was likely the only exposure that many Americans had to Indians or Indian Americans. That seems to be changing however, with the recent success and popularity of Indian American actors, filmmakers and comedians like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, and Kumail Nanjiani.