Word: thackeray
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...there's something about her Vanity Fair that doesn't quite work. There is no depth beneath its bright surfaces, no potent emotional undercurrents. One thinks of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, also based on a Thackeray novel about an ill-born social outsider on the rise. It too was a beautiful film, but it did not merely record a lost world; it peered at it?as if the fold of a dress or the knot of a cravat might possibly contain the secret of life. Or at least a useful clue to correct behavior...
...Then, too, it was touched by an ineffable sadness. Its vanities were all in vain. Thackeray said he was writing about pompous, self-satisfied people trying to live without God or humility...
FILM: The director of Monsoon Wedding takes on Thackeray...
...earned almost $14 million in limited release. Audiences have been enthralled by Nair's signature carnivalesque style and her craftiness at tying down epic scenes, like Wedding's elaborate, traditional rain-soaked Indian nuptial ceremony. So at first glance, her latest undertaking, a $23 million adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, may come as something of a surprise. It's an unveiling of 19th century London through the eyes of the indomitable social climber Becky Sharp, who starts life in poverty but uses her beauty and cunning to rise in status. The film, which opens this week...
Nair grew up in Bhubaneswar, India, 300 miles south of Calcutta, and later studied film at Harvard. These days she lives mostly in New York City (she teaches at Columbia University) and Kampala, Uganda (her husband Mahmood Mamdani is a native). But her connection to Thackeray is long-standing. "I've actively loved this novel since I was 16," she says. The broad strokes of India in the film, she adds defensively, are mostly from Thackeray, who spent his early childhood in what was then a British colony. "My criterion for doing something is, Can I think of anyone else...