“Battles are lost in the
same spirit in which they are won” — Walt Whitman.
When it came to movies, I never thought geopolitics and nuanced ideologies could be executed in such a flow. Mira Nair, in scene one to the last, got The Reluctant Fundamentalist the movie singing to the orchestrated beats of Mohsin’s Hamid’s novel by the same name, which both engaged and enraged, ignited and smothered. Many a time, the journey from book to film has fallen midflight, choking on pace, rhythm and entertainment value. Nair’s direction, given her past experience with other masterpieces like Mississippi Masala, was true to its form and outdid her own standards of making diverging worlds come together, in the process, of course, juxtaposing hypocritical schemas.
On stooped shouldered Pakistanis in the US, post-9/11, rested a thousand variations of stories like Wall Street wiz-kid Changez’s (Riz Khan). Regardless of how fiercely they were “catapulted into success”, and xenophobia ate at their otherness, from New York to California. For the less gifted it was imaginably harder. I know, because I too was there. And with so much to offer, that world also, then, made itself agonising.
To “What do you feel about the USA,” Changez answers, “I love the United States of America.”
Almost as a testament to the gist of the film, a more western outlook may find it ‘reductive’, but with this art one breathes better because somewhere in history is chronicled the humiliation of strip searches, mistaken identities and the horror of anticipating when you’ll be asked to step aside at airports. Even more astute is the transformation path Changez takes from this love to carving out his own interpretation to what he feels about an ideology. Akin to growing an extra limb, tightening an emotional muscle and cultivating a new dimension of consciousness, an alternative to the binary of terrorist versus the conformist narrative.
And at no point was believability stretched. This probably was owed to the powerful performance of Riz Khan, his ego and his troubled relationship with the “reckless” Erica, artfully played by Kate Hudson. Equally brilliant were Kiefer Sutherland and Liev Schreiber. The cast from India, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri, playing parents to the protagonist, brought alive the Lahore middle class: love for literature, commitment to family, devotion to culture. Meesha Shafi’s acting debut in this film was refreshingly bold, a rarity, given the passive shyness that is signature for women actresses from Pakistan depicted in Hollywood.
One scene crosscutting to another left behind no strain of unanswered questions, tied neatly together through narrative and helped by beautiful tracks. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Mori Arj Suno sung by Atif Aslam strummed the cords of ‘self’, an override in Changez’s struggle for his identity. Ali Sethi’s Dil Jalaney ki Baat and Shabana Azmi’s expressive eyes are a combination that comes to cinema after years.
Even the best of films sometimes have at least one cheesy line that survives script rewrites because the writers can’t let it go, yet, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has only gems:
Changez’s mentor warns him that the life he is abandoning will lead him to “migraines and mortgages.”
Changez when asked where he sees himself in 10 years says, “Dictator of an Islamic country with nuclear capabilities.”
“I am not just another man,” Changez says to Erica. “But you are,” she replies.
Spectacular are the dialogues when Changez visits Turkey, the country where his transformation really begins. Even more dazzling are the sights; the culmination of film techniques are at their best when he leaves the country for Pakistan.
In the end, however, when the café scene comes to a climatic end, the violence could perhaps have been left out. There seemed to have been an attempt to create a Raymond Davis-like reenactment, but I felt the message was so powerful in itself and this twist did not particularly strengthen nor weaken it.
Like the US post-9/11, Erica looks backwards, and Changez almost falling for the same pattern alters his outlook to look ahead. Like a true hero, he’s likable to an extreme, and above all, symbolic of the superhuman capacity, in this case to forgive.
The writer is a technology and media professional and a freelance writer based in Lahore. She can be reached at [email protected] and her Twitter handle is @AishaFSarwari