The Mystic Masseur

Ismail Merchant, best known as the producing half of the successful Merchant-Ivory team, once again steps behind the camera as director for this story of life among Indian expatriates in the 1950s. Ganesh (Aasif Mandvi) is a young man who was born to a community of Indian exiles living in Trinidad. ...more

The Mystic Masseur, based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, is a mildly amusing way to pass a couple of hours, but it isn't incisive enough to make a lasting impression. Ismail Merchant is the producing half of the Merchant-Ivory team, and he doesn't have the kind of command of tone and story that James Ivory demonstrates in films like Howard's End and Remains of the Day. That's not always a bad thing, because this lack of a consistent mood allows the story to follow its path from ...more