East Is East (1999)

By CinemaSerf

It’s early 1970s Britain and “George” (Om Puri) has been running his chip shop in Salford for many years since leaving his home (and wife) in Pakistan. Not long after he arrived after the war, he met and married “Ella” (Linda Bassett) and they’ve had half a dozen children, many of whom are now starting to become eligible for the marriage game. Though he has integrated, up to a point, he is determined to ensure that the traditions of his homeland and his faith are continued with his children. They, on the other hand, are British through and through and over the course of the next ninety minutes we see just how, in various fashions, they begin to rebel against their father’s increasingly puritanical and occasionally violent behaviour towards them and their mother. All against the background of Enoch Powell espousing his “rivers of blood” philosophy, things in this tightly knit family come to an head when the parents of prospective wives/daughters-in-law arrive for a family conference and the wheels all start to come off. It’s a very dark comedy this, and it captures the clashes of cultures and sexes entertainingly as well as quite potently at times. The actors playing the siblings deliver competently enough, but it’s the young snorkel-jacket wearing “Sajid” (Jordan Routledge) who steals the scenes as his youthfulness gives his character (and us) an unique observation point from which to watch his family turn from two adults with children into one all adults and just two children. It takes a swipe at arranged marriages, pride, snobbery and bloody-mindedness but it also pays respect to the older man’s traditions and illustrates with a degree of sympathy just how difficult he found it to adapt to the profound changes that were emerging around him and about which he had a frustrating lack of control. It’s not exactly laugh out loud funny, but it’s still an enjoyable and pithily scripted and delivered film that has more than a ring of truth to it.