With hostility currently bristling against Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of the Abbottabad-dwelling Osama bin Laden, the timing of the film ‘West Is West’ is fortuitous. When pundits are bristling with sabre-rattling indignation, it can’t hurt to shine a light on everyday rural life in the country’s Punjab province.
This sequel to the 1999 comedy ‘East Is East’ returns us to the rancorous bosom of the Khans, a mixed-marriage family steered by the blustering patriarch Zahir “George” Khan (Om Puri).
The year in 1975 and George’s youngest son Sajid (Aqib Khan) is enduring a tough adolescence in Manchester. At school, he is attacked by racist schoolmates for being a “Paki.” At home, his father believes he is straying from his cultural roots, especially after he is arrested for shoplifting.
George’s solution is to ship the lad to dad’s birthplace, the town he abandoned years earlier to begin a new life. George returns with his son, which obligates him to face the Pakistan family he abandoned three decades earlier. Peevish at the notion of trying to fit in with his father’s strange new culture, Sajid is doubly alienated by his circumstance.
This movie takes place only five years after the events of ‘East Is East,’ but the movie itself arrives 12 years later, a bold presumption that audiences will remember the first film well enough to fall back into the curious rhythms and fractious relationships of this sequel. Fortunately, ‘West Is West’ stands alone reasonably well. Even playing a blustering, oft-foolish patriarch, Om Puri lends the film undeniable gravitas.
