Clarifying relationships It is a little pity that the movie, neglecting modernity, rolls back for forty years, where instead of electronic gadgets, the hero uses an ordinary paper sheet for communication, and instead of a video call on Skype, collecting things and holding his son's armpit, flies to see relatives, without whom he did for several decades, going to wash the brains of a teenager, and, on arrival, it turns out that he will have to clean his own.
In light of the contemporary crisis of multiculturalism, the film may lack a few themes to let politics roam. But, I think it is for the best that instead of provocative ideologicality, the film absorbed only the personal, touching only the national issue, revealed in the intersection of the British and Pakistani family.
Having lost his place, a Pakistani who settled in Battle, who took the name George, drags his youngest son to the first homeland in order to open his national roots and teach him to be proud of his origin, not paying attention to the humiliating antics of hooligan classmates who lower the head of half-bloods to the bottom of a sanitary pot.
Conceived for the education of the young man, the trip becomes a test for George himself, when, together with his first love, he will have to remember the first name, when his name was Jangir, and the movie, breaking up into plot streams, will boil with the fun of new acquaintances of his son, making himself cheerful friends, and frown with thick eyebrows of a drunken man who returned to the reproaches of his first wife abandoned by his youth.
Meet after thirty years, the spouses will not have to share a common bed, but they can not escape from clarifying the relationship, how not to escape the displaced person from public rumor and remorse, torn between two countries and two houses, between two women and two ways of life, solving the painful task of self-identification, which is much more successfully solved by his unblinked son.
It is impossible to ignore the painful dialogues of aged couples divorced by the flight of their beloved husband, who sentenced his wife to celibacy, who burned her beauty in decades of loneliness. The esteemed acting works of Oma Puri and Sheba Chadha allow you to fully feel the fragility of the situation of both who have lived a life of separation, waiting, with memory and unconsciousness, with deception or delusion, with love or without love.
The pain of a late meeting is blurred by the carelessness of a visiting teenager with the help of a crafty mentor who makes acquaintance with the whereabouts of his ancestors and extracurricular commandments, from which his father, embarrassed by the meeting, is used, taking away his brother’s matchmaking from the head of the family, turning marriage into a laugh of fate.
The abundance of pampering does not detract from the originality of the spoiled character, which was built by Ajib Khan, who spoke here under his own name, who in free style decomposed the changes of a young rebel, transformed by the educational power of a wise teacher, ahead of him, who delayed with the epiphany of a parent, or rather, for the game, leaving time for the choice that the second wife, who doubted him, demands from her husband.
Appeared together with her friend, the British passion of the bewildered “Paki” brings to the film a certain share of an exotic extreme that weakens the newly aggravated intensity of passions that now divide two women, between whom, as between two homelands, the heart of a man is torn, looking for the same answer that before the eyes of the Pope finds his already daring son, who swallowed good advice and breathed the dusty wind, along with the spirit of ancestors and the ashes of many centuries.
The film ends in the Indian way, a life-affirming wedding, where the union of young people falls into a series of exemplary solutions that protect children from the mistakes of their parents. True, times are changing, and who knows how much will come of this naive retro story, strolling through the past, evading global nationalism, warningly limited to a local case of moral dissonance, where everyone chooses from the heart, and not pronounced in vain “God”.