Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair

by John Kenneth Muir

“I want my films to explode with life.” –Mira Nair. This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West. Her twin themes of realism and romance make for dazzling cinema.

John Kenneth Muir analyzes all of Nair's work,

• Salaam Bombay! (1988), the groundbreaking story of a young boy abandoned by his family on the streets of Bombay.

• Mississippi Masala (1991), an interracial small town romance between an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and an African American businessman (Denzel Washington).

• Monsoon Wedding (2001), featuring a Bollywood carnival atmosphere, one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the United States.

• Hysterical Blindness (2002), the HBO film featuring Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, looking for love in all the wrong places.

• The big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the Thackery novel Vanity Fair (2004), starring Reese Witherspoon, Gabriel Byrne, and Eileen Atkins.

322 pages, Paperback

First published June 19, 2006

About the author

John Kenneth Muir (born 1969) is an American literary critic. He has written as of 2023 thirty two books, many in the fields of film and television, with a particular accent on the horror and science fiction genres. He has been described as one of the horror genre's "most widely read critics", and as an "accomplished film journalist". He is the creator of the 2023 audio drama Enter the House Between, as well as the new novellas based on the series.