Absorbing ‘Storm’ Views Culture Clash in Emigre Life

“Storm in the Afternoon” is the latest and one of the most impressive attempts to explore the impact of American culture upon the contemporary immigrant experience.

Ambitious and absorbing, the film explores a major crisis in the life of a distinguished and highly successful Indian-born orthopedic surgeon (Kavi Raz) and his wife (Naila Azad). Director Robin Podder and his co-writer Jean Fitting, in adapting a story by Siraj Choudhury, draw upon the conventions and devices of melodrama, so popular in commercial Indian cinema, and even bring in elements of the suspense thriller, in creating and illuminating their portrait of the doctor, his unhappy wife and their world.

Much of the couple’s existence reflects an uneasy and conflicting blend of mainstream American life and an insular Indian community that is at once gossipy and conservative; this awkward combination affects the couple and their destiny more than they realize. Raz’s Dr. Ajay Bose is a man on the verge of realizing the dream of a lifetime, only to find that life unraveling with breathtaking swiftness.

After 20 years in America, Bose has become a rich man, and now he feels an obligation to return home to establish a charity hospital outside Calcutta. He will administer to the poor, and his wife will help him run the institution. As noble as Bose’s sentiments are, he is nonetheless a traditionalist to the core, a workaholic who has paid no real attention to his wife or her needs over the years.

It never occurs to him that after two decades in the U.S. his wife increasingly longs to lead a life of personal self-fulfillment--and that by American standards he has neglected her shamefully and, worse yet, basically regards her as property. He is genuinely shocked when she announces that she wants a divorce and learns that she’s long been involved with another man (Indrajit).

He reacts very badly and with the genuine bewilderment of many a man who has never thought that his wife might yearn for an identity apart from him. Indeed, in his genuine hurt and bewilderment he utters that timeless, universal remark of obtuse husbands everywhere: “I’ve given you everything you ever wanted.”

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Raz, a powerhouse of an actor, and Azad are strikingly effective in expressing this essentially naive couple’s tempestuous struggle for self-knowledge. Bose ironically is as helped by his chance encounter with a bright young woman (Lubov Demchuk) whose troubled past has led to prostitution as his wife has been hindered by her romance, blind to the fact that her lover is a reckless, risk-taking would-be entrepreneur interested only in the money he thinks she can get out of her husband.

As a first-time, modestly budgeted film, “Storm in the Afternoon” is not free from awkwardnesses and is richer in content than style. Yet it is involving and impressively even-handed. If American ambition and materialism can easily corrupt, it suggests, a blind adherence to old country tradition can equally cripple and destroy. As countless immigrants before them, Bose and his wife discover the importance of choosing what’s best from both of their worlds.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: complex adult themes.

‘Storm in the Afternoon’

Kavi Raz: Dr. Ajay Bose

Naila Azad: Sumita Bose

Lubov Demchuk: Stacey

Indrajit: Neil

A Filmopolis release of an Incom Films production. Executive producer/director Robin Podder. Screenplay by Siraj Choudhury and Jean Fitting; from an original story by Choudhury. Cinematographer Douglas Glover. Editor Mark Rollins. Music Noel Webb. Production designer Rahul Ray Podder. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

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