A couple of days after mentioning Jhumpa Lahiri in a blog post, I unexpectedly saw her in person. The Italian Cultural Centre in Delhi, as part of an ongoing series where prominent Indian writers introduce their favourite Italian films ahead of screenings, had invited Lahiri to present the inaugural film — ‘Il Sorpasso’.
Sruthi and I gate-crashed the event and thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Il Sorpasso is a road film that follows a carefree, smooth-talking extrovert, Bruno, who pulls a shy law student, Roberto, into an impromptu road trip across Italy. It begins a light, fun trip that slowly uncovers the tensions of Italian society of the early 60s.
Lahiri in her introduction spoke a bit about this and I was out of my depth as I had no knowledge of the Italian economic miracle that the movie was analyzing. Thanks to the LLMs, I learnt that after the devastation of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan helped stabilize the Italian economy and what followed was a period of rapid economic revival across Italy. Within a decade, car ownership surged, family holidays became common, and a new culture of leisure — yachts, beach resorts, and relaxed sexual mores — took hold. The boom eventually ended with the 1973 Oil Shock driven by the OPEC. Much of this newly prosperous, fast-living social order gets critiqued in Dino Risi’s film.
The movie is on YouTube but nothing beats the joy of watching stuff on the big screen.
Though ‘Never meet your heroes’ is an axiom I try to follow, Lahiri was every bit as I expected her to be – erudite, sophisticated, brilliant and stunningly beautiful. She spoke of how she discovered the movie after moving to Rome and in the end stated that it was the first time she was seeing it on the big screen. Her take that the seductive charm of Bruno, despite him being annoying, homophobic, a womanizer, and overall abhorrent, can serve as an allegory for the times we live in was particularly impressive.
Leaving you with this portrait of her taken at the Fatehpuri Masjid in Chandni Chowk. Clicked by the one and only Delhiwalla!
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