7/17/2004 » Film

Mira Nair’s second major studio film, Vanity Fair, based on a classic William Thackeray satire on English high society, opens September 1. It features Reese Witherspoon with a not-half-bad English accent; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, a sharp-jawed lad whom Nair borrowed from Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham; and a brace of estimable actors better known in the UK. Nair is attempting to banish the ghosts of The Perez Family, her last big-budget effort, which flickered faintly at the box office.

In the postcolonial era, this is delicious irony rather than mimicry, the suppressed chronicling the invaders and scrambling to outdo the other in their Englishness. Nair adds to the melee begun by Merchant-Ivory and Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, the most successful bandit queen of all. The City of London, that prototypical palimpsest which modeled Boston’s Charles River traverses and the Queen’s Necklace in Bombay, was built on a torrent of blood money extracted from the colonies.

Nair works in some subtle desi shout-outs for the trailer: Bollywood and Moulin Rouge-inspired dancers, payals on a disembodied foot, a vaguely desi title track, an elephantine royal procession.