Cross-Cultural Fallout

“My Son the Fanatic” opens with what should be a high point in the life of Parvez (Om Puri), born in Pakistan, but for the last 25 years a cabdriver in the northern English city of Bradford.

Parvez and his wife are having tea with their presumptive future in-laws, the Fingerhuts, celebrating the engagement of their son Farid (Akbar Kurtha) to the daughter of one the town’s top officials. “This boy of ours, I can assure you he’s all-around type going whole hog,” Parvez says in his charmingly mangled immigrant’s English, so delighted he doesn’t notice the cross-cultural discomfort everyone else in the room is feeling.

Best known for “My Beautiful Laundrette,” writer Hanif Kureishi calls his latest work “a romantic film with ideological edges,” and what makes it exceptional is how much subtlety and compassion Kureishi and director Udayan Prasad bring to both halves of that equation.

Effortlessly well-written, with nuanced characters that easily come to life on the screen, “My Son the Fanatic” does justice to the unlikely love story it uncovers as well as the troubling underlying reality of adapting to a new country and a new culture. Intelligent, poignant and witty, it involves us in real issues without stinting on their complexity and without forgetting to be caring toward people caught in the undertow of forces they cannot begin to control.

Even without this impending marriage, Parvez initially feels content. He still loves his wife, Minoo (Gopi Desai), though over the years their relationship has grown distant and pro forma. He doesn’t even envy the success his best friend, Fizzy (Harish Patel), has had in the restaurant business. Then, like an emotional pincers attack, three factors combine to bring his life to a crisis.

Most devastating is the change in Parvez’s only child. Once a boy who loved clothes and considered modeling, Farid is now intent on getting rid of all his worldly possessions, including his music and even his cherished guitar. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” he tells his baffled father, “and you were so right.”

Parvez initially suspects drugs, but the truth is even more devastating. In a reverse twist on the usual scenario of traditional parents and modern children, it is the searching son who embraces the Muslim fundamentalism the father rejected. “Our cultures cannot be mixed,” Farid insists, and flays modern Britain for being “a society soaked in sex.”

As if to underline that point, Parvez becomes the regular driver for a visiting German (“Breaking the Waves’ ” and “Good Will Hunting’s” Stellan Skarsgard), an amoral businessman, more obtuse than anything dangerous, who seems to live only for pleasures of the flesh and says things like “Don’t you love the sound of silk on skin?”

That last remark is inspired by Bettina (Australian Rachel Griffiths, Oscar-nominated for “Hilary and Jackie”), a local prostitute who uses Parvez’s taxi for late-night service. Almost without knowing it, this pair of societal outsiders begin to depend on each other for the honesty and quiet decency they can obtain nowhere else. With all his moorings gone, desperate for tenderness, Parvez finds himself emotionally drawn to Bettina even as he realizes how impossible their situation would be.

Celebrated Indian actor Puri, a veteran of dozens of films from “Gandhi” to the works of Satyajit Ray, gives a moving, captivating performance as the capsized Parvez, struggling to believe that the truths he’s always held are still valid. Griffiths is also outstanding as a woman who knows what reality is but also knows what she wants and needs.

Director Prasad (a British TV regular whose feature debut was “Brothers in Trouble”), always sensitive and empathetic, is impressive in the way he honors the script’s determination to give all aspects of this complex situation their due.

For though “My Son the Fanatic” is at times bemused at Farid’s zealotry, it leaves no doubt that the racism and lack of respect he decries in British society is both real and pervasive. And while Parvez is equally convinced that the rigidity of fundamentalism and its insistence on purity and conformity is not a solution to anything, he has difficulty formulating an alternative that has any meaning for his son.

While “My Son the Fanatic” is too subtle and thoughtful to offer simple solutions--Parvez’s declaration that “there are many ways of being a good man” may be as close as it gets to a summing up--Kureishi and Prasad have given this story a nuanced, bittersweet ending that has more staying power than a more conventional finale would. For if the answers to these pervasive problems were simpler, if the tangled emotions these peoples’ lives call forth were easier to sort out, “My Son the Fanatic” wouldn’t be half the memorable film it turns out to be.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality, language and a scene of drug use. Times guidelines: adult themes and situations.

‘My Son the Fanatic’

Om Puri: Parvez

Rachel Griffiths: Bettina

Stellan Skarsgard: Schitz

Akbar Kurtha: Farid

Gopi Desai: Minoo

Harish Patel: Fizzy

Released by Miramax Films. Director Udayan Prasad. Producer Chris Curling. Executive producer George Faber. Screenplay Hanif Kureishi. Cinematographer Alan Almond. Editor David Gamble. Costumes Mary-Jane Reyner. Music Stephen Warbeck. Production design Grenville Horner. Art directors Colin Blaymires, Sarah Kane. Running time: 1 hours, 26 minutes.

Exclusively at the Westside Pavilion Cinemas, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 475-0202; Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; Town Center, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 751-4184.