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Sometimes an absence is also a kind of presence. Take “The Namesake”. Irrfan Khan as Professor Ashok Ganguly suddenly dies, leaving what looks like stretches of aching silences in bereft Ashima’s (Tabu) life.

And yet, look at life’s ironies - the death of the patriarch in this Bengali family in New York triggers off a stretch of mending and nurturing that culminates in a kind of healing that signifies a beginning born out of an end.

Mira Nair’s new film is so tender at heart you often forget these are actors enacting scenes from a well-known Pulitzer-prize winning novel.

The actors lose their plumes so completely that we don’t even get the chance to be astonished by the subtle craft that underlines almost every moment in this mellow migratory drama.

The cross-generational conflict between a first-generation Bengali family in the US and their culturally confused kids is aligned by a soft hyphenated humour, which propels the poignant plot without making the highlights in the Ganguly family’s journey from Kolkata to the US seem like an ostentatious migratory pilgrimage.

Nair stays wedded to a muted emotional expression even in the strongest moments of drama.

When Ashima, now a Bengali housewife fully acclimatised to the often-peculiar and savagely funny cultural contradictions of America, suddenly loses her husband, Nair takes her actress Tabu into the deserted but brightly lit places for her breakdown scene.

The changes in the climate are never underlined to punctuate the drama. Instead, Nair lets the snow and the sun swathe the film’s moistened canvas.

More than anything else Nair’s film is a homage to the apparently dwindling family ties in the strangely self-serving social structure of modern times where self-gratification almost invariably outdistances the needs of the larger familial unit.

The cutting, often savagely satirical, dialogues slice through the lives of these disoriented characters defining their geo-political insolvency in scenes that accentuate the quirky ethnicity of a Bengali family ensconced in the American Dream.

Such is the lyrical simplicity of Nair’s storytelling that we are frequently left with a feeling that sequences should’ve gone a little further, a little deeper into the characters’ collective and individual predicament.

Yes, the end game is slightly stifling in its celerity. The episode about Ashok and Ashima’s son Gogol’s Bengali wife’s extra-marital affair with a French lover seems a trifled hurried and out of pace with the gentle swaying movements of the rest of the narration.

It’s almost as though time was running out on the people Nair has so lovingly carved into living entities on screen.

The sense of unhurried lives moving away from the breathless impulses of a civilisation that has no patience with lyricism and literature imbues “The Namesake” with a feeling of prideful dramatic exploration, equally remarkable for what is said and what remains unsaid.

Scenes between Tabu and Irrfan are outstanding in their correct unhurried manoeuvres signifying the long-term momentum of an arranged marriage culminating in a quiet unstated love between the couple.

Both Irrfan and Tabu are exceptional. Irrfan replicates the body language and the spoken words of his Bengali NRI’s character less strenuously than Tabu. But her expressions of wifely devotion and motherly anguish are to die for. Here’s an actress who proves there’s more to acting than meets the eye.

Kal Penn as the plot’s fulcrum of cultural displacement gets the gait and the eventual poignancy of historical reclamation right. And so does the rest of the vast cast of seasoned and professional actors who get together to celebrate the rites and rhythms of cultural reclamation.

Suffused with a superbly sensuous supporting performances and steeped in an ethos of enormous cultural reverberation in “The Namesake”, the acutely lyrical camera takes us from the quiet streets of New York to the picture-postcard bustle of Kolkata, creating in the journey a passage into a world where hands reach out across colours and continents to caress the soul

Trust Akshay Kumar to play the dependable, noble man waiting for his wife to succumb to his charms even if it takes him (and her) forever.

He did it in “Dhadkan”. Now he does it with finesse in Vipul Shah’s neatly-written film about a mal-adjusted British-Asian family in London grappling with the vagaries of a socio-cultural system that makes children of Indians and Pakistanis more Britons than the British.

Or so believes Katrina Kaif, whose character is similar to that of Saira Banu in Manoj Kumar’s “Purab Aur Paschim”. Katrina brings into play all the uncertainties of a generation that’s caught between Indian tradition and the pubs of Britain.

Shah keeps his story of a British Indian girl’s journey into the heart of Punjab and a Punjabi lover-boy tightly reined-in. It highlights the cultural conflicts that Britain throws up for migrants.

London is captured not as an exotic city but the hub of a hectic cultural conflict, which sometimes reminds us of Gurinder Chaddha’s “Bend It Like Beckham”. At times, Shah takes off into a world of comic candour, portraying the nuclear British Asian family in all its parodic glory.

Suresh Nair’s writing skills are on display in almost every scene. He brings parody and poignancy into picturesque play. Watch Rishi Kapoor and his Punjabi son-in-law Akshay Kumar bond over beer and giggle at the dining table.

The narration moves into the streets of London with as much fluency as the dusty gullies of Punjab. Bringing Indian and British cultures together are the outstanding technicians and actors. Jonathan Bloom’s camera captures London’s ethnic underbelly well.

Rishi Kapoor as the worried father of a spoilt London lass is great. Katrina finally comes into her own. She’s the portrait of bubbly brattiness.

Shah, whose earlier films relied heavily on Gujarati theatre, comes into his own too. He takes gentle but stinging swipes at the rootlessness that characterises the torn lives of Indians abroad.

The Indian Diaspora becomes the subject for a strong, drama-driven celebration of music, songs and an ironic humour that pokes fun at conventions that irrigate and yet retard the growth of Indian cinema.

Only the Pakistani sub-plot, with Upen Patel, doesn’t gel with the plot. Shah tries to give the film darker shades than the genre permits. Thankfully these lunges at socio-cultural profundity do not scar the narrative.

Watching this film is like chewing on a gum that retains its flavour much longer than you expect

“Does it have to be about sex only?” Esha Deol, playing a newly wed in an arranged marriage that ostensibly seems to be coming apart at the seams, even before the honeymoon is over, asks her ever-accommodating husband churlishly.

What does marriage have in store for the average newly married couples? Meet Abhay Sachdeva (Fardeen) and Ritika Khanna (Esha) - they are the perfectly mismatched couple.

As the film opens, writer-director Meghna Gulzar, who’s clearly treading much more comfortable ground this time after her directorial debut “Filhaal”, shows the chance meeting of Abhay and Ritika. And within the next 10 minutes they are married and off on their honeymoon.

No time wasted, no frills, and certainly no humbug. Meghna treads on a terrain that’s more in Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s league than within her dad Gulzar’s domain.

The mood of the honeymoon tale is an appealing shade of pale. The young director goes softly into the bedroom, creating for the nervous couple a kind of desirable paradise that is obtainable with just a little brush against each other’s hands or a whispered huddle in the foggy romanticism of Ooty.

When it comes to creating a supple and slender scenario of spousal synergy, Meghna gets it right. The other couples - whether old and cranky, played by Satish Shah and Kirron Kher, or the bold Bikram Saluja and Perizaad Zorabian - manage to create a telling contrast with the bewildered protagonists as they discover, in hushed motions, that the true essence of compatibility lies not in clutching hands but holding on to one another’s trust and confidence.

A trifle too romantically idealistic at heart?

Perhaps… “Just Married” aims to portray marriage in mellow pastel colours. There are no over-the-top interludes, no moments in the film that the director’s mentors - Mukherjee and Gulzar - would frown at.

She melds modernity into traditional values with understated sensitivity. If we see a couple making out in the woods, we also see a wife coyly putting on bangles in front of the mirror as though she were paying homage to Hema Malini in “Khushboo”.

If Pritam’s background score suggests a time gone-by, the confident editing patterns take the narration into areas in Ooty where the honeymoon becomes a playing field for emotions that would set the pace for the rest of the marriage - which we won’t be able to see.

Seeing isn’t believing in “Just Married”. Meghna often uses smiles and silences to convey emotions. Words are never allowed to get in the way… not even Gulzar’s lush lyrics that are resolutely played in the background.

The pace frequently drops as though the director was allowing the characters and their languorous mood to take over.

Don’t look for hard rain and pelting sunshine in this muted ‘mellow-drama’. What we get are warm and familiar vignettes from a marriage that most of us have experienced.

The comfort of the familiar never leaves this cosy look at a honeymooning couple’s attempts to come to terms with love, marriage and, yes, sex.

Both Fardeen and Esha escape the trappings of masala cinema to give sincere performances. Esha often looks as scrubbed and vulnerable as her mom Hema did in Gulzar’s “Khushboo”.

Bikram and Perizaad, as the ever-willing lovebirds, define their roles with ample exuberance. But Mukul Dev and Sadiya Siddiqui as a Muslim couple wither in hazily defined parts