Light shines on everyday Punjabi life

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This article was published 06/05/2011 (5637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WITH hostility currently bristling against Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of the Abbottabad-dwelling Osama bin Laden, the timing of the film West Is West is fortuitous. When pundits are bristling with sabre-rattling indignation, it can’t hurt to shine a light on everyday rural life in the country’s Punjab province.

Not that the family being portrayed is in any way a normal family. This sequel to the 1999 comedy East Is East returns us to the rancorous bosom of the Khans, a mixed-marriage family steered by the blustering patriarch Zahir “George” Khan (Om Puri).

The year in 1975 and George’s youngest son Sajid (Aqib Khan) is enduring a tough adolescence in Manchester. At school, he is attacked by racist schoolmates for being a “Paki.” At home, his father believes he is straying from his cultural roots, especially after he is arrested for shoplifting. George’s solution is to ship the lad to dad’s birthplace, the town he abandoned years earlier to begin a new life.

George returns with his son, which obligates him to face the Pakistan family he abandoned three decades earlier.

Peevish at the notion of trying to fit in with his father’s strange new culture, Sajid is doubly alienated by his circumstance.

George is not all that comfortable either. The trip obliges him to reckon with his ex-wife (Ila Arun), a woman whose silent stoicism masks deep wells of hurt and resentment. George attempts a gesture of apology by building her a new house. Sajid, in the meantime, tries to make the best of the situation, soaking in some of the wisdom of a village elder, befriending a mischievous local kid, and taking on a wife-finding mission on behalf of his similarly exiled older brother. And just when things may melt down entirely, George’s current wife and Sajid’s mum Ella (Linda Bassett) breezes into town, demanding to know why George has been slowly, inexorably emptying their bank account of funds accrued from their modest fish-and-chips business.

This movie takes place only five years after the events of East Is East, but the movie itself arrives 12 years later, a bold presumption that audiences will remember the first film well enough to fall back into the curious rhythms and fractious relationships of this sequel.

Fortunately, West Is West stands alone reasonably well. Even playing a blustering, oft-foolish patriarch, Om Puri lends the film undeniable gravitas. Khan is a charming young actor who, contrary to his character, plays well with others.

Scriptwriter Ayub Khan-Din, a British-Pakistani actor and playwright who also wrote the loosely autobiographical East Is East, blends a daunting mixture of coming-of-age story, melodrama and farce. But director Andy De Emmony integrates all these disparate elements seamlessly into a satisfying saga of reconciliation.

Again, the timing is fortuitous.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MovieReview

West Is West

Starring Om Puri

Globe

14A

102 minutes

3 1/2 out of 5