Culture Shock
FILM: East Is East
DIRECTOR: Udayan Prasad
STARRING: Om Puri, Linda Bassett
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In East Is East, George Kahn (Om Puri, right) is married to a British woman (Linda BassetT) and is a `casual' Muslim, so how do we account for his wanting to arrange marriages for his children?
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Om Puri plays a working-class Pakistani immigrant to Britain who is at odds
with his wife and son about the prospects of the child's planned wedding. What
is this, a re-release of director Udayan Prasad and screenwriter Hanif
Kureishi's sadly overlooked My Son the Fanatic? Quite the opposite,
actually. In last year's drama, Puri plays a taxi driver striving to
assimilate, delighted that his son is planning to marry an Anglo girl. But
then, all in a whoosh, the son dumps the girl, embraces his father's religion
and becomes a Muslim fundamentalist.
In this year's comedy, East Is East, by director Damien
O'Donnell and screenwriter Ayub Khan-Din (adapting his stageplay), Puri plays
the owner of a fish-and-chips shop who is married for two and a half decades to
a red-headed British woman but nonetheless insists on following the traditions
of his birth culture by arranging intra-faith marriages for all his children.
Puri's magnificent talent is amply demonstrated here. Proceeding from the same
place he did in My Son the Fanatic, he arrives somewhere entirely
different, and that display of such astonishing range is sufficient reason
alone to give this new film a look. If you have to choose, however, rent the
video of My Son the Fanatic.
George Khan (Puri) came to Britain in 1937. In 1946, he fell in
love with and married Ella (Linda Bassett). Today, in 1971, the couple have
seven children -- six boys and a girl. The oldest, Nazir (Ian Aspinall), is in
his 20s; the youngest, Sajid (Jordan Routledge), is perhaps 12. All the Khan
kids speak standard English and none of their father's native language at all.
He has tried to raise them as Muslims, but they haven't taken their religious
training very seriously. They try to keep it from their father, but all the
kids, save the devout Maneer (Emil Marwa), eat pork. The older boys drink when
they get the chance. Mostly, the Khan siblings just want to hang out and enjoy
the heady freedom of their time. Blossoming teen Meenah (Archie Panjabi) would
much rather wear short skirts or bell-bottom jeans than the sari her father
expects. And, for a long time, we gather, in a gentle conspiracy with their
tolerant mom, the Khan children manage to be the Brits they want to be without
vexing their father too greatly.
That changes as the oldest children approach marriage age and
George insists on choosing their spouses in the ancient tradition. First comes
the disaster of his attempt to marry Nazir to a beautiful Pakistani girl. Nazir
bolts at the last minute and leaves her standing at the altar, prompting George
to declare his son dead and order the rest of the family to break off all
contact, an edict they defy from the beginning. George makes matters decisively
worse when he arranges a double wedding for his next two oldest sons, Tariq
(Jimi Mistry) and Abdul (Raji James). The girls he lines up this time are
almost buffoonishly unattractive, and when the two boys revolt against their
father's wishes, the whole family is thrown into turmoil.
Powerful stories can be made from the struggles of immigrant and
mixed-race families to find a comfortable place in a world where their skin
color and religion mark them as different. I fear that the filmmaking team
associated with East Is East, however, has done less with this material
than they might have. One problem arises from the picture's inconsistent tone.
On one hand, the film settles for low comedy that involves giant dogs knocking
people to the ground and young boys staging urination contests. On the other
hand, the film introduces harrowing scenes of domestic violence that leave its
victims with split lips and bruised faces. Needless to say, the two don't go
together, and the latter renders the former all the more repellent.
A second problem lies with poor narrative choices. It is
preposterous, for instance, that parents could "discover" that they'd neglected
to have Sajid circumcised as the boy approaches pubescence. At first, I thought
this must be a ruse that Ella had played on a husband who didn't change
diapers. But Ella is as surprised as George. Elsewhere, scenes seem to arrive
as if from a different movie. What's going on with the Pakistani cinema owner
who changes the movie in the middle of a reel just for George and his family?
Why wouldn't the other patrons scream bloody murder? What's the rationale for
revealing so late and for so little purpose that Nazir evidently is gay? And
might not the arranged marriages for Tariq and Abdul have proved explosive
without ridiculing their prospective brides and turning the young women's
parents into objects of such scorn?
The biggest problem, however, comes with the construction of
George's character. The filmmakers want to have it that George and Ella have
enjoyed a fundamentally loving, even tender relationship. But scenes in which
George beats her and his children are just too strong to enable us to
understand the loyalty she shows him. Surely, we aren't to believe that George
has only recently become violent? Moreover, the picture doesn't illustrate
George's reasons for demanding a faithfulness to Muslim and Pakistani tradition
that he himself did not follow. We can presume that he has known
discrimination, but the film doesn't bother to illustrate the slights and
frustrations that would help us to understand his reactionary bitterness.
In sum, the audience needs to feel a stubborn affection for George
even as he disappoints us. And that doesn't happen. Instead, by the film's
closing half hour, we've come to detest him and can't grasp why either his wife
or children have tolerated his cruelty for so long.
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