Flak Magazine: Review of East is East, 05-16-00

East is East, Damien O'Donnell's second film, defies its own title and presents the viewer with a style of filmmaking that draws from the best of the East and the West. Imagine the fast-paced, situational humor of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers combined with the emotional, story-telling camerawork of India's greatest director, Satyajit Ray.

This unlikely fusion appears in the very first scene. We see a group of Pakistani children marching in a Christian procession through the streets of a Manchester neighborhood. Suddenly an older Pakistani man joins the onlookers -- his arrival is a surprise to several women who run ahead and warn the children. While the procession marches on, the children take a detour through some side streets so as to not be seen by the man. Crucifixes and virgin statues bob and wave humorously at the camera as the children scurry along. We see one of the English women who warned the children stand next to the Pakistani man and understand that they are married and the children are theirs. The camera focuses on the wrinkled laughter lines around the man's eyes. He enjoys being with his neighbors, but yet his own children were afraid to be seen...

The father of the family, George Kahn (Om Puri), moved from the soon-to-be-independent Pakistan to England in 1937 and fell in love with an Englishwoman named Ella. Together they opened a fish and chips shop in a working class neighborhood in Manchester. The film is set in the early 1970s, by which point George and Ella have been married for over 25 years and have seven children. The three oldest sons are in their early twenties and, therefore, are of eligible age to be joined in an arranged marriage. Or so the father thinks.

About the only thing Pakistani about George's children are their names. Tariq (Jimi Mistry) has an English girlfriend and drinks at nightclubs. Saleem (Chris Bisson) is secretly an avant-garde art student, but tells his father that he is studying engineering. And the two youngest children, Meenah (Archie Punjabi) and Sajid (Jordan Routledge), spend most of their free time playing on the streets with their English friends.

The film's opening humor centers around the children mocking Pakistani rules and customs while carefully trying to cover up when the father is watching. They eat pork, avoid the mosque, don't pray, mimic Bollywood dance routines, and roll their eyes at traditional garb.

Yet, the ease with which they cast off their Pakistani heritage belies subtler moments that show a brewing identity crisis. Sajid, in an entertaining allusion to South Park's Kenny, always wears a hood, obscuring his face — and obviously his darker skin. Maneer prays and studies the Koran, but faces ostracism from even his siblings who refer to him as "Gandhi." Abdul is cast away from a stag party prank because his friends know he should not drink alcohol.

Their father also straddles two cultures awkwardly. While he is a devoted member of the local mosque, he has chosen to marry a non-Muslim Englishwoman. George's fish and chips shop is a quintessential part of working-class England. And he swears like a perfect working-class Englishman. But his own integration in English society concerns him. He confides to his mullah, "People say you can't be English and still be a good Pakistani."

It is George's desire to appear to be a good Pakistani that leads him to trouble. The mullah suggests that George will be more at ease if his sons are more solidly linked to the Pakistani community through an arranged marriage.

The attempts to marry his sons bring out into the open conflicting values, expectations, and understandings that until this point were not central to the connections within the family. The film enters ripe territory for farce, but amazingly O'Donnell takes the story into dark emotional territory while still offering moments of brilliant comedy.

George's insistence on the marriages forces everyone to take sides, and leaves deep feelings of betrayal. When George turns violent on his wife and sons, the viewer remains partially sympathetic -- making the violence all the more terrible to behold.

The father is humanized through the repeated symbols of tea and Arabic watches. Even after difficult arguments, Ella and George are able to reconnect through their love of tea. She asks, "Will you have some tea?" and he responds, "Just half a cup."

While the tea acts as an important bridge between East and West, the wristwatch becomes a divisive symbol. As George's sons perform Muslim rituals for their father (such as circumcision or marriage), George buys each of them a watch with his name and the hour marks in Arabic. To his sons, the watch is a small recompense for a foreskin or the freedom to love and the watch becomes a symbol of their father's tyrannical use of religion. Tariq, upon finding in his father's room a chest of wedding materials and a watch with his name on it, throws the watch on the floor and crushes it. The camera picks up both Tariq's anger and George's pain upon seeing the shattered glass.

When Tariq confronts his father with a flat refusal to marry "a Paki," George suddenly assumes the identity of a pure Pakistani and Tariq responds by assuming the identity of a pure Englishman.

George: "A good Pakistani son does what his father tells him."

Tariq: "Dad, I'm not Pakistani. I was born here. I speak English, not Urdu."

George: "Son, you do not understand 'cause you don't listen to me. I try to show you a good way to live. You know the English, English never accepting you. In Islam, there is no black man, no white man."

George's argument rings much like Dr. Aziz's, the central Muslim character in A Passage to India, E.M. Forster's masterpiece that explored many of the same tensions between these two cultures. In essence, it is the argument that a minority culture cannot integrate with a majority culture and keep its coherence, power, and respect.

But this segregationist argument is set up to fall flat in East is East. There are few scenes in the film where English characters are not accepting of the children. The glaring exception is a two-dimensional old Englishman who spouts out anti-immigration slogans. But even this man's grandson doesn't buy his racism: he is good friends with Sajid and learns to say the greeting Salaam to his Pakistani neighbors. And when the eldest son leaves to go to his marriage ceremony dressed in full Pakistani costume, the neighborhood mob comes out to cheer him on.

George's cultural and religious values ultimately lose out to family and class values. When George accuses Ella of not being a good Muslin wife, she points out that she has given him seven children and 25 years of work in their shop. Work and family are the ties that bind most in this neighborhood.

The tensions O'Donnell builds by the climax of the film are released, in typical English fashion, by humor. Few scenes in recent cinema can match the hilariously awkward exchanges between Ella and Tariq's would-be mother-in-law that result in Ella shooing her guest out the door with a hearty "piss-off."

The film ends without elaborate explanations when the viewer badly craves them. Instead, O'Donnell chose to let the camera speak, which this reviewer preferred over any tidying up of loose ends.

Visually brilliant, emotionally tense, historically relevant, damn funny. This film isn't just for "Pakis" and art house addicts, but sadly, that's probably all who will see it in American theaters.

— Benjamin Arnoldy (benjamin@csmonitor.com)