Some of the reviews I read are so intellectual and consider all sorts of aspects, which I suppose is the mark of a true movie lover. I am not an intellectual and rarely read more things into a script than I see. This movie just seemed silly to me, with village folks putting great emphasis on what, admittedly to me, are small things. I thought it made a general statement that these people are cheap, always concerned with the cost of everything and resentful of spending. I doubt that is an overall characteristic of Trinidadians. My other half and I both began falling asleep watching this. We finally decided to watch the rest of it the next morning. Sure enough, we were yawning and staring blankly until the end while enjoying our morning coffee. I am glad there are folks who enjoyed it, and agree that it is definitely not commercial.

In 1940's Trinidad, Ganesh leaves his teaching job in the city to return to his father's village to try and become a writer. He struggles at first and ignores attempts by his late father's friend Ramlogan to get him to become a masseur like his father. When he marries Ramlogan's daughter Leela, he sets to write his books proper but the gamble is slow to pay off. At this point Ganesh decides to play up his slight reputation as a masseur – a reputation that has been made more appealing locally by his showmanship giving him a 'mystic' air. As he grows in stature as a masseur, so his book sales increase and he finds himself opened into the potential of politics, inspiration and corruption.Attracted by this being an Ismail Merchant film, I wasn't sure what it was about or what it was going to be like. The plot interested me from the start as I tried to understand the flashback structure; it went further to show me a community that I didn't even know existed. However these were not enough and the film just didn't seem to go anywhere; sure it told a story, but it didn't seem to take much of the audience with it and it produced a story that goes very slow and, although it has stuff happening, it was surprisingly unengaging and actually rather dull. The characters are semi-interesting and the plot is the same, but the delivery drags it all down. At points it is rather amusing but again the delivery reduces the impact this has and it makes it sporadic rather than infusing the wit with the rest of the film. The film tries to take the story of Ganesh from humble beginnings to a place where he has grown beyond what he first wanted but it doesn't work as a story in itself nor as an allegory for the growth of Trinidad or the community. It is not terrible but many viewers will feel that it doesn't really go anywhere and, even worse, it goes there very slowly and with limited entertainment value.The cast are mixed; by which I don't mean some are good and some bad, but I mean that they are all a bit hard to judge. Their accents is a good example; is their mix of Indian & Patois spot on for the place and period or is it as poor as I thought when I first watched it. Patois is a hard accent to pull off without sounding silly (look at Brad Pitt in Joe Black!) and I wasn't totally convinced here – I accept that the mix would sound funny anyway but in this film too many people sounded like they were forcing it – as indeed they were. However they also mostly do well with their characters and it is not their fault that the film lets them down. Mandvi leads the cast well but he doesn't manage to help us totally understand Ganesh – and I'm not convinced that he totally understood him either. However he does change well over the film as required but this is not enough given that the film is his to dominate as the main character. Dharker is as gorgeous as ever and she is pretty good when the film allows her to be, mostly in the first hour. Puri is a great actor and given high billing here but the film doesn't hardly use him and then just forgets he is around; his delivery is great though and he is a big part of the wit that the film doesn't use well.Bhaskar seemed a strange choice since he is best known as a comedian in the UK but he is good here and makes for lively, honest support. Mistry is wasted and seems unsure of himself and the rest of the cast are given too little to really do to be worried about listing. Merchant's directing is good and the whole film looks colourful and interesting.Overall this is an OK film but nothing really works that well and, despite the colourful locations, communities and sets it still comes across as being rather limp and, dare I say it, dull. The story and characters have just enough going for them to become interested but not enough to really engage and satisfy as a story – the ending is a fine example of this and feels like the film just decided to stop. Maybe worth seeing once as an unusual film from Merchant but really this is only average at best.

A half century ago, Trinidad was an outpost of the waning British Empire and, like most British holdings, attracted immigrants from the jewel in the crown, India, who established villages on the island. Novelist V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, grew up there. His first few novels wryly explored the comic clash between his fellow Indians and their exotic setting. Now The Mystic Masseur, his first novel (1957) , comes to the screen directed by Ismail Merchant, best known as the producer half of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team. Naipaul published it a few years after leaving Trinidad to study at Oxford, hoping for a career as a writer. The novel, narrated by a young Trinidad Indian at Oxford, refracts elements from Naipaul's early life into a story about another islander with similar but misplaced ambitions. Ganesh Ransumair burns to make his mark in the world of letters. The trouble is, Trinidad doesn't offer much scope for a man with little learning and less talent. In his poor village on the outskirts of the colonial capital, books are so rare that a conniving shopkeeper with a marriageable daughter tries to score points with Ganesh by showing off his library, a collection of tattered paperback mysteries he's obviously never read. The daughter wins a few points, though, with her beauty and odd enthusiasm for English punctuation, of all things. A marriage is arranged and the new wife waits impatiently for her husband to finish the book that will make them rich. It turns out to be a pamphlet on Hinduism that fails to sell. Ganesh is then persuaded to try his hand as a masseur – actually, a faith healer – and once he gets the patter right and performs a few miraculous cures, he's on his way. Now the books he writes sell like hotcakes, not because Ganesh is a great author, but because he is a famous mystic. He parlays his fame among island Indians into an election victory, winning a seat on the colonial council. Caryl Phillips' screenplay starts where Naipaul's novel ends, with a young Oxford student, an Indian from Trinidad, sent to meet an island statesman named G. Ramsay Muir at the railway station. Muir turns out to be Ganesh, thoroughly Anglicized and eager to visit the dreaming spires of the university town. Phillips invents scenes of Ganesh gushing at the riches of the Bodleian Library, marveling at all the learning he was never able to acquire. In the novel, learning that Muir is the ex-masseur is a comic punch line that caps the story of a man eager to reinvent himself. Phillips' decision to start there and then backtrack to Ganesh's rise leaves the movie without an ending and skews its themes. But the movie works best where the novel also succeeds, in characters who wait impatiently while young Ganesh works out his mission in life. Chief among these is Ramlogan, the shopkeeper played by Om Puri, a veteran of Indian cinema. Wily, crass, but always polite, Ramlogan seems to smell the money this poor scholar might make. His daughter Leela (Ayesha Dharker) steals a few scenes when she wonders aloud why Ganesh isn't making any. As for Ganesh, Aasif Mandvi's performance seems driven by the plot, not the character. James Fox shows up twice in a weird cameo role as an Englishman gone native. The Mystic Masseur is wildly comic when Merchant can get Ramlogan, Leela, and Ganesh into his lens. Then the interplay between Ganesh's ambition and the more practical concerns of his wife and father-in-law get laughs. Their dialect, Indian English with a Caribbean flavor, is also fun to listen to, although hard to follow at times. But Merchant is not much of a director, with too many flat shots of characters talking in the middle distance and cutaways to show their reaction. The languid editing also deadens the pace. Coming so soon after Monsoon Wedding, a much more lively film, Mystic Masseur seems slow and unconvincing once it gets past village scenes. It aims at themes its characters never quite hit. Comedy comes from situations Ganesh finds himself in, not from the wobbly arc of his upward career. What's missing in this adaptation is the affectionate wonder of Naipaul's narrator who can laugh with but also at Ganesh but who also, in the novel, offers an implicit contrast to his ambitions. As Ganesh strives to become something more than the mystic masseur, he crashes into a theme Naipaul would develop in his later novels: the troubled identity of the exile caught between different worlds. In 1957, when Naipaul was just starting out, he could look back on Ganesh with wry affection, confident that his path would follow that of his narrator instead. A half century later, with laurels, a knighthood, and long residence in England, Naipaul himself seems to have hardened into a smarter, more successful G, Ramsay Muir.

Being from a similar culture as Trinidad, I couldn't resist picking this one up. Atypical of Merchant/Ivory films, this one is a period piece set in pre-independent Trinidad and follows the rise of Ganesh from a frustrated teacher in Port of Spain to an elected member of parliament. Overall, the film does tend to be slow in some parts, but the lively dialogue is very good. This film follows the Indo-Caribbean culture of the West Indies very closely. I found myself identifying closely with the people and found them to be very credible characters. The juxtaposition of Colonial Trinidad and a country on the verge of independance is hinted at throughout the film. However, the political tensions were kept to a minimum. It would have been nice to have seen how Ganesh and his cronies dealt with the coming age of independence.One of the great scenes of the film occurred when Ganesh tries to talk to the striking dock workers. The emotion is clear when he realizes his rise to power came at the cost of his charisma. Overall, a very good film.