Cataclysmic comedy

East Is East (15) Ayub Khan-Din's culture-clash comedy East Is East was in at the start of the Anglo-Asian comedy boom. It was a stage hit at London's Royal Court in 1997.

That movement reaches its apotheosis with the release of Khan- Din's cinematic adaptation, directed by Damien O'Donnell. It wowed Cannes earlier this year and has been touted as 1999's Full Monty.

It's certainly a close cousin to last year's hit. Both more or less gloss over complex social problems - post-industrial unemployment in the one, Anglo-Asian relations in the other - with breezy comic confidence. Both have fun with body parts. Both are set in unfashionable north-of-England locations.

East is East introduces us to the Khan clan, residents of Salford, 1971. George Khan and his English wife Ella run a chip-shop. We meet them on the wedding day of their eldest son Nazir, moments before the cataclysm that kick-starts the drama.

Nazir isn't best pleased to be entering an arranged marriage. He bottles it at the altar and scarpers. Aghast, George tightens his grip on his remaining kids and excommunicates Nazir.

The film is executed with a light touch by rookie director O'Donnell. George isn't demonised and that's largely thanks to a sympathetic performance from Om Puri.

The generation gap is the film's complementary concern and one that should ensure it a broad appeal.

In those conflicts between cultures and between parents and kids, East Is East is an even-handed umpire. Arranged marriage isn't unequivocally bad and it's not only whites who call Asians "pakis". In the film's most horrific scene, George beats his wife and family, insisting on his patriarchal right to respect and obedience. Such is Puri's performance, it is George for whom we most fear. The film withholds qualitative judgements about the culture he practises and the one to which his kids belong. We see both through very human eyes.

We also see them through the hood of a parka. The film's perceptions are those of young Sajid (Jordan Routledge), who peers at the bewildering adult world from his anorak cocoon.

One subplot sees father haul youngest son off to be circumcised. George is hardly more lenient on Sajid's elders. Tariq (Jimi Mistry) has to sneak down the drainpipe for a night on the town.

Imagine the horror, then, when George dictates to bolshy Tariq and milder brother Abdul that the two are to marry the daughters of a Bradford butcher.

O'Donnell keeps the wider audience on board with as many comic cracks at teenage gawkiness as at the cultural incongruity of the Khans in Salford (daughter Meenah singing Bollywood while filleting fish at the chippie; the Khan brood blowing clear the bacon-buttie fumes as dad's key turns in the door).

It's all the more dramatically disappointing that, when O'Donnell seeks to illustrate the awfulness of Tariq and Abdul's impending marriages, he does so by introducing as their preordained wives two farcically ugly young women. The film's delicate balance between laughter and compassion is undermined. There's nothing cheap about the family holocaust that ensues, however, which elicits from the cast performances that expertly foreground the conflicts that have bubbled under throughout. Linda Bassett as Ella is particularly notable here as the stoic better half who doesn't yield to George's hysterics.

The film casts an amiable but never trivial light on a community whose appearance in British cinema is as welcome as it is overdue.

Brian Logan

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.