Kama Sutra . Tucson Weekly . 04-03-97

Kama Sutra

DIRECTED BY: Mira Nair

REVIEWED: 04-03-97

Mira Nair, the director of Mississippi Masala and Salaam Bombay! delivers a sexy, good-natured, and slightly self-indulgent meditation on love and sex in 16th-century India. Indira Varma plays Maya, a saucy servant girl talented in the art of love. Her beauty and cunning take her from the palace to the street and back again in this sexy Cinderella story featuring bare-chested hunks wrestling and dark-eyed beauties making out with each other. Nair's visual sense is stunning and lush, cinnamon and rose-colored; you can practically smell the spices on the breeze. The sex scenes are torrid too--Nair has apparently confounded the censors in India, who allow depictions of violent sexuality like rape but prohibit the portrayal of direct physical contact. It's easy to commend Nair for wanting to introduce positive images of sexuality to Indian cinema; it's a little more difficult to sit through the second half of Kama Sutra, after the plot starts to wind down and all the principals have already done the deed with each other.

--Stacey Richter

Other Films by Mira Nair
The Perez Family

Film Vault Suggested Links
Carrington
The Wings of the Dove
Kissed

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