I recently finally got around to watching Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist based on Mohsin Hamid’s novella of the same name. And after a long time I felt I should write something down, not as a review per se, but because of the various feelings I experienced watching it.
Before I get into what I thought of the film, let me share a couple of revelations I had.
The first came to me while I found myself scanning the visuals and listening to the Urdu dialogue for inauthenticities and – at one point – cringing at a famous Iqbal couplet recited wrongly. I suddenly realised how we, as a nation, often tend to look at non-Pakistani films about Pakistan and Pakistanis in a way we never look at other films. Mainly because we don't have the tools to judge them but also perhaps because we don't feel we need to. Is it a defence mechanism because most of these films paint a not-too-sympathetic portrait of 'our country'?
Perhaps we look for these inauthenticities to validate a course of action that we have already decided in our heads, to better beat a work down by nitpicking its minor mistakes. Think of the controversy around Zero Dark Thirty and its alleged misuse of language or the quibbling about the Punjabi accent of actors in Khamosh Pani (I am using this as an example of a non-Pakistani film even though it is by a Pakistani director only because it was perceived as such).
Attention to detail really does sometimes set a film on a higher pedestal. But does it really matter to an audience, watching the film in, let's say, Brazil, whether the Urdu lettering on a sign is in Naskh instead of Nastaleeq font, if an accent is correct or if a college depicted (as in this film) actually looks like a real college in Lahore? Do mistakes in art direction or language coaching change the impact of the story? I had to consciously try and stop myself from looking at the film as a defensive Pakistani and I am not sure I entirely succeeded. But it's a worthwhile exercise to try.
The second epiphany I had was the realisation that it was easier to judge the film for itself if I detached myself from the book that I had read. Admittedly, this is very difficult to do for most people; especially with books that have left a significant impact on them (this is why my theory is that it is far easier to adapt flawed books rather than near-perfect ones.) Maybe it was easier to do for me because I had forgotten most of the details of the original which I had read six or seven years ago and only remembered frameworks and emotions. (Full disclosure: I had actually approached Mohsin for film rights but they had already gone into auction by that time.) And this is what had drawn me to the book in the first place – the fact that its thinness of detail (it was basically a monologue) invited playing around, re-imagining portions and adding details to it. But I found that detaching myself from the book really helped me appreciate the film better, which is what a film should be critiqued as – as a creative work wholly in and of itself.
So, how was it for me purely as a film?
Despite some harsh criticisms that I had read and heard, I actually thought the film was not bad at all and actually very engaging until almost near the end. There was a convincing buildup of how the protagonist – a young Pakistani in the US – changes from an enthusiastic participant in globalised (read Western) capitalism to someone forced to become more aware of his own cultural moorings and his position as a Muslim in post-9/11 America. This intersection of economics with race, religion and culture is quite believably handled and very ably portrayed by actor Riz Khan.
I do remember reading scathing reviews of the film in the Western press (such as this one in the New York Times) but having now seen it, I think they were often glib or exaggerated. I didn't even find Kate Hudson as terrible as she had been made out to be by most Western critics, though I can certainly see that a better casting would have added a sorely missing oomph to the character. In fact, my feeling after seeing the film is that some of the Western reviewers' attacks on her portrayal were actually about her character's flakiness, particularly an act of supreme insensitivity committed by her. And I couldn't help thinking that this was perhaps a Western defence mechanism about how ‘one of their own’ is portrayed.
Also, much as I was initially dismayed when I had heard that the film had retained the book's framing device of the protagonist telling his story (all too common in many films, e.g. Life of Pi) right from the beginning, the film actually managed to pull it off for the most part – it didn't just bookend the rest of the story but actually had its own momentum. If I were to (for a moment) compare the film to the book, I would say the strongest element of the book for me – a sense of sinister ambiguity of the motives of the two characters, one telling the story, the other simply listening – is lost halfway into the film. But surprisingly, this did not dismantle the film for me because the film's screenplay had its own logic.
Where the film actually falters is at the 1 hour 44 minute mark, almost 80 per cent into the film. Because from here on the screenplay simply loses its coherence. The critiques of the film’s narrative that I had read earlier actually hold true from here on out. Perhaps the need to develop a Hollywood-style thrilling climax causes it, but what made eminent sense earlier, suddenly stops making sense, and directorial heavy-handedness overtake what had until then been a fairly sophisticated style of storytelling. (Spoiler Alert! If you still haven’t seen the film and plan to do so, skip the following two sentences.) Basically the problem here is this: After building up a case for how American government operatives lacking in nuance may be totally mistaken in assuming that an anti-imperialist academic is a terrorist, the film shows the academic actually is very much involved in the kidnapping of an American by militants. And yet, we are supposed to be on his side when he decides to free his captive and to believe that he faces no American retribution.
In that it is fitting but unfortunate that the film which for the most part kept taking the viewer out of comfortable predictability, ends on a clichéd, politically correct eulogy the protagonist mouths.
End Note: The most powerful music in the film for me - obviously coloured by how it is used – had me scrambling at the end credits to check who the vocalist was. I kept wondering who this new woman was with such a unique, raw but powerful voice – it had shades of Abida Parveen but was too thin to be her and I was convinced it was someone new I had never heard before. Turned out, it was Atif Aslam.