Film review

  • East is East

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Damien O’Donnell (1999)

    East is East is adapted by Ayub Khan-Din from his successful stage play of the same name.  Like the screen version of The History Boys, you keep thinking the material must have been much better in the theatre to deserve its reputation – even if you can’t quite see how.  And like some other British cinema of the 1990s (Brassed Off, The Full Monty, etc), East is East feels, in spite of its origins, more like an extended episode of a television drama series:  the ‘serious’ equivalent of the stretched-thin-for-the-big-screen adaptations of TV sitcoms of the late 1960s and 1970s.  The story is set in Salford in 1971.  George Khan (Om Puri), a Pakistani immigrant, has been married to a white British woman (Linda Bassett) for twenty-five years.  They have six sons and a daughter and run a fish and chip shop.   The mainspring of the story is the clash between George’s tyrannical traditionalism – centred on his insistence on arranged marriages for his sons – and his children’s self-image as British and culturally liberated.  This tends to be illustrated in crude scenes of juxtaposition:  the elder sons eat hot dogs while watching an Enoch Powell speech on television then hurriedly get rid of the food when their father returns home.

    None of the challenging elements in the material is followed through:  a mixed marriage of this kind in 1946 must have been unusual but we never get any sense of what that meant for Ella in particular, in terms of the reaction of her family and friends, at the time – or what she thinks now that her husband’s aggressive narrow-mindedness is causing terrible tensions in the family.  After the eldest son Nazir (Ian Aspinall) walks out of his wedding ceremony and the family’s life at the start of the film, George regards Nazir as dead (he tells people he has five sons rather than six):  this colossal trauma (and major social embarrassment) appears to have next to no residue in the lives of the Khans.  (It turns out that Nazir has started a new lifework as a hairdresser – in Macclesfield, although the salon suggests Beverly Hills – and that his reaction against the arranged marriage may have been more an expression of sexual preference than an act of cultural rebellion.)   It’s incredible that the kids don’t react more to their mother’s injuries when George has hit her.  (It seems this is a new departure, not something the family is inured to.)  The whole approach – to try and keep the audience happy when the material is not simply feelgood – is epitomised in a scene that forms the comic climax of the film:   a sculpture that the art student son has been working on (it’s a mystery how he was allowed to go to art college) is revealed as pretentious-pornographic then, literally, thrown into the centre of the action – to scupper the father’s plans to pair off two of the boys with the grotesque daughters of a Bradford businessman.  (The virtual destruction of the art work seems to mean nothing to the son who made it.)

    At the end of the film, it appears that George has learned the error of his ways.  The suggestion that an inveterate bigot can shed the weight of entrenched views like switching off a light is not just offensively shallow.  It contradicts the whole premise of what has gone before.   What’s striking about East is East nine years after release is its implication that resentment of Asian immigrants by the indigenous community of Salford is a thing of the past.  The ignorant racist mouthpiece is an elderly man (John Bardon).  There don’t appear to be similar tensions among the young, a view which may have been rose-tinted at the time the piece was written and which now seems prelapsarian.  Many of the actors have done their best-known work in the years since in EastEnders and Coronation Street (in which Ayub Khan-Din had a featured role before his writing career took off).  They include Chris Bisson, Raji James and Jimi Mistry.  Ruth Jones (from Little Britain and Gavin and Stacey) is the overweight sidekick of one son’s girlfriend.  The film isn’t conspicuously enlightened in its presentation of characters who are fat, ugly or gay.    One of the best things is the selection of contemporary pop songs (‘Banner Man’, ‘When I’m Dead and Gone’) on the soundtrack.

    10 May 2008

     

  • Greed

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eric von Stroheim (1924)

    This is one of the most notorious cases of butchery by a Hollywood studio in cinema history.  As a result of what MGM did, most of what Eric von Stroheim intended for the screen is lost.  What remains in this version screened by BFI is slightly more than two of the eight hours that von Stroheim wanted audiences to see[1].  There are moments when the narrative seems disjointed and you naturally suspect that the studio’s cuts are to blame.   The balance of power in the marriage between the protagonist John McTeague and the lottery winner Trina shifts abruptly:  the shy bride develops a forceful personality in the blink of an eyelid.  My eyes were closed for longer than that during their courtship so I may be wrong about this.  I was wide awake, though, when the unhappy couple’s downward spiral is well advanced and Trina takes a job as a kindergarten cleaner:  it’s puzzling as to why, once the kids have gone home, she looks to have the large, apparently comfortable premises to herself.   What MGM did may be unforgivable but it would be hypocritical of me to pretend that I wish Greed had gone on for another six hours.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine, given the scale of the story in what survives, how it could have done so.  Even so, this is a very remarkable film.

    Greed is the tale of a trio of differently greedy characters.  The third is Marcus Schouler, from whom McTeague steals Trina and who resolves to revenge the loss of his girl and her money.  Even I am unlikely to forget the final scene in Death Valley.  Mac releases the caged bird which has been part of his life throughout his marriage:  the freed bird flies just a few yards before it falls dead.  The final desolate image is of Mac’s dead horse and of its owner handcuffed to the corpse of Marcus, and condemned to die with him in the desert.  Greed was adapted by von Stroheim (with intertitles by June Mathis) from the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, published in 1899 – although the action in the film runs from 1908 to 1923.   The story concentrates on a small number of characters and includes many scenes of limited domestic life but the cautionary tale is told with such intensity that the movie, even at two hours, feels epic.  The tone is far from unrelievedly grim:  there are some funny visual details in the early stages, like the uncouth Marcus picking his ears and nose, or Trina’s little brothers misbehaving and getting mild corporal punishment in return.  The emotional variety of the wedding sequences is dazzling.  We see (but the people on screen don’t see) a funeral procession going past in the street outside the window of the building in which the marriage ceremony is taking place.  The gorging at the wedding breakfast is spectacularly disgusting and throws into relief the gross physicality of the characters (and the obesity of a good few of them).

    Eric von Stroheim’s powers of vivid realisation are sustained regardless of the physical scale of the setting, whether it’s Death Valley or a cramped and claustrophobic room.   There are brilliant dream sequences, especially one in which skeletal long arms grasp, almost wash themselves in a hoard of coins – this picks up the valuable muck of the gold mine where McTeague is working at the start of the film.  Except for the occasional discontinuities mentioned above, the storytelling is very clear (and the intertitles in silent films always help you to know what’s going on).   Gibson Gowland as McTeague is gradually more powerful as the film progresses and Jean Hersholt is good as his nemesis Marcus.   I liked Zasu Pitts as Trina in the early scenes.  Once Trina’s transformation into a grasping termagant is complete, though, Pitts seems to settle into silent movie acting of a more outdated kind.   Carl Davis’s score (composed, I guess, during the 1980s) has some good bits but is probably more effective in a larger theatre than NFT2.   The music was sometimes overpowering in that small space – and often redundant.  Von Stroheim’s images don’t need this kind of assistance.

    20 August 2012

    [1] The Wikipedia article mentions a ‘239 minutes (restored) version’ but there’s nothing to suggest that this is extant.

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