‘Fanatic’ Shifts From Reflective to Relevant

The air is choked with the sounds of people in high places calling each other evil. While many have been chilled into silence or withdrawal by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, others in this country and abroad have been goaded to a white-hot rhetoric of absolutes. However people feel about the attacks or America’s response, most, if not all, cry out for closure that makes them “feel good,” the way closures in movies usually do.

I’m no different. There’s comfort in absolutes. It’s one of the reasons I kept putting off seeing “My Son the Fanatic” again on home video, even though that 1999 British film has been on my mind a lot since Sept. 11. I remembered how much I liked the movie the first time I saw it. But I also remember that it left no easy answers and no closure, really, of any kind. And I also remember that it dealt with Islamic fundamentalism and its devastating impact on a Pakistani family in northern England.

I didn’t know whether I was ready to confront such issues even in a movie I’d previously enjoyed because it steered clear of absolutes. Which was precisely why I needed to see it again.

“My Son the Fanatic” originated from a short story by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote screenplays for such hip, humane films as “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985) and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), both of which dealt shrewdly with matters crossing racial and sexual lines in Thatcher-era Britain. For the filmed version of “Fanatic,” directed by Udayan Prasad, Kureishi wrote a screenplay that stretched and deepened his story of Parvez (Om Puri), a Pakistani cabdriver bewildered by the changes that have overtaken his beloved only son, Farid (Akbar Kurtha).

At first, Parvez thinks it’s drugs and consults his best friend, an English prostitute named Bettina (Rachel Griffiths), for advice. But Parvez is stunned to find out that Farid has broken off his engagement with the Anglo-Saxon daughter of the town’s police chief and fallen in with an Islamic fundamentalist sect, whose members Parvez unwittingly agrees to house under his roof.

Farid bristles with righteous contempt for his father’s acceptance of Western values. And to some extent, you wonder if the kid has a point, given Parvez’s seeming obliviousness to the revulsion of his son’s would-be in-laws toward the brown-skinned cabdriver and his family. Parvez also endures vicious racist taunts in a nightclub where he’s taken a visiting German businessman (Stellan Skarsgard), who uses him as a personal valet trained to fetch him liquor and prostitutes such as Bettina.

Puri, who in a just universe should have received an Oscar nomination for his beautifully conceived performance, wears his character’s contradictions with insightful grace. Parvez can be embarrassing in his dogged, grasping pursuit of success and approval in a decadent society that diminishes his humanity. But, just as doggedly, he protects his soul by playing Brook Benton and Louis Armstrong LPs in his basement. Parvez’s wife, Minoo (Gopi Desai), who is closer to Farid in piety without going to extremes, disapproves of Armstrong’s music (“Too trumpety!”) along with many of her husband’s worldly, defiantly secular yearnings. Parvez and Bettina are drawn to each other because they recognize and accept dimensions in each other that no one else in their world can see.

The climax comes during a violent demonstration at the local brothel where Bettina works. Farid, who takes part in the brothel’s firebombing, seizes the fleeing Bettina and beats her viciously. An outraged Parvez drags his unrepentant son home to deliver some punishment of his own, whereupon Farid asks, through his rage and tears, “Who’s the fanatic now?”

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That’s where Kureishi’s original story ends--with blunt and, to my mind, limited irony.

The movie goes further. Farid storms out of the house to move in with his Islamic brethren. Parvez follows him in his cab. He’s not begging his son to come back. He senses that may be impossible.

But he asks his son to at least consider the possibility that, as he puts it, “there are many ways to be a good man.”

Did Farid hear him? I don’t think so. One is left with the sad thought that the son will never again hear anything his father says to him. Parvez’s fragile certainties, in the end, are shattered. All he is left with is his music, his Scotch, his strange, frowned-upon bond with a hooker.

No “feel good” closure, to be sure, in conventional terms. Yet there’s something inspiring in Parvez’s willingness at the end to sit still, play the blues very loud and figure out where to go from here.

If this new war they keep talking about on television is as much about states of mind as about belief systems and biology, then count me on the side of those such as Parvez who cling to battered souls under siege from extremists and decadents alike.