East Is East Review
by "David Gardiner" (d DOT gardiner AT virgin DOT net)February 11th, 2000
In Damien O'Donnell's "East is East", a screen version of Ayub Khan-Din's stage play, Linda Bassett plays the white English wife of a Pakistani immigrant (Om Puri) to 1970's Salford. Written by an Asian, it is essentially a situation comedy dealing with the cultural "no-man's-land" in which the children of immigrants find themselves, and the strains inside the family produced when the younger generation begins to feel the pull of the host culture.
The plot is perfunctory, and I won't take up your time with it here. I was enticed to see it by a number of inexplicably positive reviews in the London press. I thought it was cheap, offensive, unimaginative and peopled entirely by racial and class stereotypes of the most crass kind. It portrays a Muslim father who is totally indifferent to the happiness or wellbeing of his children, fanatically devoted to the ritual and trivial aspects of his religion, spouting obscenities at all around him, taking out his frustration in violence on both his wife and his children when he is unable to get his own way, physically ugly and unpleasant in his personal habits.... the list seems endless. The realism and brutality of the father's violence sits particularly uneasily in something that does not even aspire to tragi-comedy. There is hardly a racial stereotype that this cardboard cut-out central figure does not embody. His family too seem like ciphers introduced to embody clichés of "the younger generation" stuck between two cultures: we have the gay brother, the religious brother, the terrified younger brother (whom Puri has no hesitation in subjecting to a late circumcision in order to keep up appearances when he finds that it was overlooked at the correct time), the rebellious daughter. Only the white English second wife seems noble and long-suffering, and even capable of some degree of common affection. The other Asian family that we meet is similarly monstrous, the father bullying and overbearing, the wife cold and critical and obsessively ambitious for her offspring, the two daughters ugly and seemingly mindless.
The comic elements are hackneyed and heavy-handed, descending to slapstick more than once, as when a "sculpture" looking like a section cut out of an inflatable rubber "adult doll" is thrown on to the lap of the surly visiting mother, or when the children try to hide the bacon and sausages they have been eating when they hear their father's approach. This stuff is sub-Alf Garnett ( a British TV sitcom working-class Fascist and racist bigot par excellence, for those of you who don't watch British TV). In fact a real Alf (and I know he is not a rarity) would be delighted with the whole ethos of this film. It could be hired for British Movement coffee evenings. There is not a shred of understanding of or respect for the Islamic way of life in this film. What it seems to say is "Everything you've ever heard about the Pakkies (or whatever derisory word you want to insert) is true". Presumably it is supposed to be excused by the fact that it was written by an Asian. This argument doesn't cut very much ice with me. I am not saying that a writer or a director has any kind of duty to present "PC" depictions of a particular race or group, but merely to pick up on a dominant racist carricature and reinforce it uncritically like this seems to me inexcusable, and frankly lazy. I think it betrays the same degree of internalised racism as the outcry of one of the brothers in the film: "I don't want to marry a Pakkie!".
Compare (if this isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination) Puri's brutal patriarch in "East is East" with Topol's character in "Fiddler on the Roof". Like Puri, he was a man brought up in traditional religious and social values to which his children would not adhere, but his reaction was sadness and apprehension for their future happiness, as he wrestled to understand the new and unfamiliar world that they were growing up into. But far more importantly, in Topol's case, we could see the value of the traditions that he clung to, how they had served the Jewish people and how they could produce happy and loving families and a context in which a good life could be lived. Traditional Judaism was treated with respect. That film/play was three dimensional, its ideas could be looked-at from different angles. Yet it was only a comedy as well - a musical comedy at that. What a pity "East is East" couldn't have had a touch more of the big-heartedness of "Fiddler". What a lost opportunity!
David Gardiner
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