East Is East

ESSENTIALLY A warm and feelgood north-English comedy of the Full Monty variety, East Is East may not exactly cut it as a masterpiece, but it’s as enjoyable and curiously sweet as any film I’ve seen in recent weeks, and it deserves more than a good run at the “plexes.

It’s a clash-of-cultures comedy with serious undertones, about a mixed-race Pakistani family growing up to be thoroughly English in ’70s Manchester – and it’s alternately moving and hilarious, without a single misjudged moment or mistimed gag.

Chip-shop owner George Khan (Puri) is known to his kids as “Genghis’, and it doesn’t take long to establish why. A devout Muslim, his seven kids aspire to take their place in the modern society that their schoolmates take for granted, all the while groaning under the yoke of George’s benevolent but tyrannical rule.

The film opens with George’s eldest son Nazir (Ian Aspinal) at the altar about to surrender to an arranged marriage, before he runs for his life. This disgraces the family so much in George’s eyes that his son is dead as far as he’s concerned, and the rest of the film chronicles George’s determined efforts to resist the inevitable as his family slowly grow older.

All seven Khan children are drawn with admirable complexity and acted with the requisite enthusiasm, to the point where you begin to wonder if they’re a real family, while their resolutely Manc accents provide an amusing counterpoint (“E’s not ’ere – ’e’s out gettin’ ’is knob cut’)

The most memorable of the bunch is Tariq (Mistry), something of a stud around town, who becomes the unsuspecting victim of an arranged marriage and explodes in a torrent of resentment and anger, as the film zooms to a surprisingly harrowing payoff.

But long after the credits, it’s Puri’s phenomenal performance which sears itself into the memory-banks: by turns pig-ignorant, kind, dogmatic, sweet and brutal, it’s as remarkable a display of acting as I’ve seen from anyone, this year, anywhere.

Don’t worry about the price of admission.