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
