Mira Nair’s adaptation of the bestseller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is a compelling tale of a man torn between Islamism and capitalism, says Jenny McCartney. Even before the characters take shape in a Mira Nair film, she has often seduced her audience with her images of the Indian subcontinent: the knock-out mixture of beauty and grime, poetry, dilapidation and chaos.
Children and animals run unrestrained through narrow streets, and glamorous women in sherbert-coloured salwar kameez step through the detritus of street markets. Western-born directors tend to romanticise India and Pakistan: Nair bares both its enchantment and its edge.
This tumult pervades The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a somewhat altered adaptation of the bestselling novel by the Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. It opens in Lahore with the abduction of an American professor, who is sweatily bundled from the street into a car, his protests drowned out by the swelling music of local singers.
The American authorities begin a frantic search, in the course of which a Lahore-based US journalist, Bobby (Liev Schreiber) interviews, at length, a young professor called Changez (Riz Ahmed) with reputed links to Islamists. Changez insists on telling him the full story of how – as a young Pakistani corporate high-flyer in the US – he first fell in love with America and an American woman (an endearing and infuriating Kate Hudson) and then began to lose his foothold in the American dream. As the story of shifting loyalties unfurls, we are left guessing precisely where Changez’s views will end up: the worst loathing, after all, is often simply love that has spoiled.
With its faintly awkward narrative structure, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is no easy story to carry. But Ahmed does so with compelling grace and subtlety, making us care about Changez even as the character admits the worst impulses of his own psyche (an unspeakable frisson of awe at the acts of 9/11, for example, before “conscience kicks in”).
Despite its unwieldiness, this film nonetheless gives an impressively thoughtful exploration of immigrant identity: the young, sharp-suited Changez loves America, but the terms on which it offers him success – as a corporate number-cruncher who ruthlessly prunes businesses of staff – quietly compels him to jettison his history; his reverence for people; and places, and the gentle legacy of his father, a poet.
As mistrust of Pakistanis blooms after 9/11, he finds himself increasingly ill at ease, and the film becomes a reminder that the immigrant’s question is often not only “What do I make of this country?” but also “What does this country make of me?”
