Bassam Tariq (2020)
Riz Ahmed is, as well as an excellent actor, a successful rap artist – solo, as Riz MC, and as one half of the hip-hop duo Swet Shop Boys. In Mogul Mowgli, Ahmed, who also produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Bassam Tariq, stars as a British-Pakistani rapper called Zed. On the verge of the international big time, he’s struck down by serious illness. As he languishes in hospital, he reflects on who he is and on his perennially fraught relationship with his father, Bashir (Alyy Khan). The film, Bassam Tariq’s first dramatic feature, has been showing at the London Film Festival prior to its release in British cinemas at the end of this month. It’s visually ambitious and absorbing, with an impressive performance from Ahmed. The mechanics of devastating disease drama and the central theme of cultural identity are awkward bedfellows, though. There’s also a surfeit of fantasy and/or bad dream sequences.
The start of Mogul Mowgli is particularly challenging for a viewer (like me) with photophobia and imperfect hearing. Cryptic images – of what could be snowflakes against a background of what looks like heaps of dun-coloured fabric – give way to Zed on a strobe-lit New York stage, delivering a fiercely political rap to a large, noisily enthusiastic audience. Back in his dressing room, the rapid dialogue between him and his manager, Vaseem (Anjana Vasan), is at the other end of the volume scale. It comes as a relief when Zed returns to his parents’ East London home, a rare visit to them before he starts his globetrotting tour. The rest of his family speaks mostly in a foreign language (I assume Punjabi) that yields English subtitles.
Besides, these domestic scenes are effective: Tariq and Ahmed illustrate, economically but incisively, cultural and generational tensions between Zed and his relatives. His birth name is Zaheer, his new one deplored as Americanisation by a young man I took to be Zed’s brother-in-law (Hussain Manawer). In what used to be his bedroom, Zed gets a pile of video cassettes ready to chuck out but is stopped by Bashir, who insists you can still sell VHS tapes on Brick Lane. We get a sense of how far back this pair’s disagreements go in brief flashbacks to Zed’s childhood (in which he’s played by Abu-Hurairar Sohail). We also get an understanding of those opaque opening shots as Zed’s grandfather (Ahmed Jamal) recalls the family’s train journey, hiding under piles of clothes, to escape from post-partition India. When this old man starts to talk, his grandson mutters that he’s heard the story often before. Bassam Tariq, too, repeats the train images several times. They’re presumably part of Zed’s mental furniture, his idea of where he came from.
His mother (Sudha Bhuchar) laments his weight loss and Zed experiences leg weakness while at his parents’ house but his health problems really start following his once-in-a-blue-moon appearance at the local Mosque, with the other, devout men in the family. After prayers, Zed sneaks into a back alley for a smoke. He’s accosted there by a professed fan who, with increasing aggression, demands a selfie with Zed. The encounter gets nasty; after a scuffle, Zed ends up in hospital. Medical checks there hint at something worse than cuts and bruises. After further tests, it’s confirmed that he’s suffering from an autoimmune disease. Although he stubbornly insists he’s fine and has a world tour to get to, Zed soon has to accept defeat. He can no longer stand on his own two feet or use the toilet unassisted.
The film uses Zed’s illness, which doctors tell him is incurable but manageable, both for narrative convenience and metaphorically. It’s a means of giving the protagonist the time to reflect on his past, future and identity. That would equally be the case if he was hospitalised after, say, a car crash but an autoimmune disease – a body attacking itself – also chimes with the sense we get that something is eating at Zed, something arising from the tension between traditions he was born into and the world, arguably inimical to such traditions, he’s become part of. Unless I failed to hear it, I don’t think Tariq and Ahmed specify Zed’s condition. This, similarly, comes in handy and is used to dramatise cultural conflict. By not naming the disease, the film-makers protect themselves against accusations that their version of its symptoms and treatment is inaccurate. It’s a means, too, of showing Zed’s conservative father’s antipathy to modern medicine: at Bashir’s request, one of his acquaintances tries cupping therapy on Zed as an alternative to the hospital’s stem-cell infusions. The latter treatment runs a significant risk of causing infertility in the longer term. An episode in which Zed is asked to produce semen, so that his sperm can be preserved, illustrates the automatic cultural assumptions made by hospital staff and enables a falling out between Zed and his girlfriend (Aiysha Hart), as he abandons the girly mags supplied and Skypes her.
‘So who is the guy with flowers on his face?’ asks Zed at one point. Addressed to his father, this is an important question: the guy (Jeff Mirza) makes repeated appearances in the fantasy parts of Mogul Mowgli. In one of these, he and Zed wrestle. It seems the florally masked man represents the spirit of Toba Tek Singh, a city in the Punjab province with special significance in the mythology surrounding Indian partition. In Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story, named for the city, an asylum inmate there isn’t sure if his home town is now in India or Pakistan. Earlier this year, Riz Ahmed released The Long Goodbye, a conceptual album dealing with his feelings of estrangement in a post-Brexit, increasingly racist Britain. One of the tracks is called ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which suggests the place has come to epitomise division – or divided allegiances – more generally. The theme is present, too, in the film’s title (also the name of a Swet Shop Boys track). The first word plays on Mughal and connotes Western capitalism. Mowgli, perhaps the most famous Indian boy in world literature, was named by his English creator.
Mogul Mowgli is an oddity. The visual movement and the sound have an urgently modern flavour (cinematography by Annika Summerson, sound design by Paul Davies). The script includes some sharp dialogue but it’s an antique construction. The sequences happening inside Zed’s head are so numerous that you start thinking he’s imagining things even when he isn’t. When his manager visits him in hospital, she’s accompanied by flashy RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), a rival rising rapper whose work Zed thoroughly despises. Vaseem proposes not only that he take Zed’s place on the forthcoming tour but that RPG uses some of Zed’s material, as a tribute to him – and enfeebled Zed agrees. It’s the stuff of his worst nightmares but we seem meant to believe this meeting is really happening.
In the most simply eloquent and convincing fantasy sequence, Zed watches his father put on a series of garments – one on top of the other, so that Bashir ends up wearing several layers. Each refers to one of his different business ventures in London – an ‘African beauty’ shop, a Karachi restaurant, and so on. The idea also links well with the piles of clothes on the train that took the family in the direction of England. At the end of the film, Zed is back on his feet. He and his father reach a new, mutual understanding. The speed of the hero’s recovery seems implausible; the reconciliation between father and son feels like a required element of this kind of story. But the pair’s relationship gains credibility throughout, thanks to the fine acting of Riz Ahmed and Alyy Khan.
11 October 2020
