There have been countless films about cross-cultural clashes in small villages or cities. We have seen everything from "La Cage Aux Folles" to just about every variation on the big city life of Italians mixing with Latinos from "West Side Story" and onwards. There are, of course, the big city films dealing with racism and mixed marriages from Spike Lee. "East is East" is one of the rare few that deals with Pakistanis living in a working class suburb in England. Although often fascinating and revelatory, the film is so uneven that you are never sure whether it is meant to be a comedy, a drama or both.
The film stars Om Puri (who has appeared in scores of Indian films, not to mention Hollywood films such as "Wolf" and "Gandhi") as George Khan, the Pakistani patriarch in a household that includes seven kids and his semi-tolerant British wife, Ella (Linda Bassett), in Salford, Manchester. The house is small yet seems accomodating for such a big family. Some of the more colorful kids includes Meena (Archie Panjabi), the daughter who has a predilection for soccer, Saleem (Chris Bisson), an art major masquerading as an engineering student, Tariq (Jimi Mistry), a disco-loving dancer who has a white girlfriend (Emma Rydal), the young Sajid (Jordan Rootledge) who is always wearing a parka and fears circumcisions, and Maneer (Emil Marwa), who is often serious and silent.
But there is friction in the house, mostly involving George and his ideals. A few years earlier, his eldest son, Nazir (Ian Aspinalli), refused to go through with an arranged marriage and was thus ousted from the family, declared by his father as "dead." Now the older sons, Tariq and Abdul (Raji James), are about to undergo a similar fate thanks to George's stubborn upholding of traditions past. What the father seems to forget is that he has married a white woman for the past twenty-five years, despite initially being married to a Pakistani woman. There is also the culture change and how the kids speak in the British tongue, not their own, and have developed and adapted according to their environment. But George will not listen to what his kids or his wife want, it is only what he wants for the family and it finally creates more harm than good.
"East is East" starts badly with the kind of heavy, indiscernible British accents you usually find in Mike Leigh's films, lots of cheaply comical innuendoes, and some desperate gags. Incredibly, when the film shifts its focus from the overall ludicrous shenanigans of the family to George, it starts to have more meaning and depth. It is no secret that Om Puri brings the film its soul, wavering uneasily between friendliness and seething anger. The transition is abrupt (as it was in "Not Without My Daughter" with Alfred Molina playing a comparable patriarch with similar shifting moods) and unshakable - after all, he is also a hypocrite for thinking that his kids will not see that their mother is not Pakistani. The fact is that even when Tariq acknowledges this to him, George still thinks he is right and that creates frustration with his family, not to mention physical abuse.
My big complaint with "East is East" is that the film never quite makes up its mind as to what kind of film it is. When it becomes dramatic and saddening, it really becomes serious. The comic relief is too reminiscent of low-grade Hollywood comedies so it certainly detracts from its high-minded darkness (there is a scene involving the purported Pakistani girl, whom Tariq is chosen to marry, and her family that involves some crude business with a piece of sculpture that would have seemed right at home in "American Pie"). This constant shifting of moods and tone may coincide with George's character but it does not prove to be as compelling or cohesive a film as it should have been. Somehow, the comedy and the drama only meet halfway.
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