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Both must escape family obligations and transcend tribal prejudices. We’ve never been to Africa.” Meena and Demetrius are both cleaners and correspondingly low-caste.

“You’re like us,” Demetrius’s younger brother tells her. Hoping to avoid a lawsuit, the wealthier Indians seek to make common cause with Greenwood’s Black population. (Most recently, she was featured in the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That.”) Washington, a decade older, already awarded an Oscar for best supporting actor, can be seen as guiding her through the film. She was so close to the part that, despite the movie’s success, it took her some time to start an acting career. Choudhury, a neophyte who grew up in Jamaica where her father was a biologist, is playing a version of herself (at one point she wears a Bob Marley T-shirt). There’s a documentary aspect to the cast as well. Nair came out of documentary filmmaking, and thanks to Ed Lachman’s vibrant cinematography, in “Mississippi Masala” the landscapes are also characters. Another follows a flashback to the family’s hilltop villa in Uganda with the mock plantations of wealthy Greenwood. The first is a cut from Uganda’s verdant paradise to a Piggly Wiggly’s consumer cornucopia in America. It is “the first in a series of collisions,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted in his favorable review, between her world and his.Īs its title suggests, “Mississippi Masala” is a movie of continuous juxtaposition. Early on she rear-ends the van belonging to a carpet-cleaning business run by straight-arrow but cool Demetrius (Denzel Washington). Luckily, Meena is also a reckless driver. “I’m 24 years old, and I’m still here - stuck here,” she tells her uncomprehending parents. Their daughter, Meena (Sarita Choudhury), who cleans rooms at the motel, is beyond that - so robustly American she could stand in for the Statue of Liberty, albeit Liberty in chains. Jay still dreams of Uganda Kinnu is more resigned to exile. Jay (Roshan Seth), a barrister in Uganda, manages a hot-sheet motel while his wife, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore, the star of Satyajit Ray’s “Devi,” among other films), runs the adjacent liquor store.

Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” begins with a bit of family history that is also a history lesson - the expulsion of Uganda’s sizable South Asian population, ordered from the country by the military strongman Idi Amin in 1972.Ī prize winner at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, still fresh and newly relevant, “Mississippi Masala” has been restored for a run at the IFC Center in Manhattan, starting Friday.Īfter a vivid prologue, the movie jumps ahead 18 years to pick up on its displaced central family, resettled in Greenwood, Miss.