Inter-Generational Conflict

Inter-generational Conflict

The issue of inter-generational conflict plays a major role in Brick Lane. In England, displaced from their country, Bangladeshi immigrants try to recreate what they have left behind, but their English-born children are influenced by the only country they know. The older folks want things to remain the same, but the younger generation wants to experience life for themselves and they want to fit in with their peers. This is a universal and age-old conflict, but it is perhaps more pronounced when a group is displaced and has the influence of another culture to contend with as well. The older Bangladeshis in the London community are appalled by the way their children dress and by their experimentation with drugs and alcohol. The younger generation looks at their parent's inaction in the face of great social troubles with disgust. The older people see their culture being destroyed, while the younger ones simply see it changing. The cycle will continue, as evidenced by Karim who criticizes both his father's generation and the generation of adolescents coming up after him.

My Son the Fanatic is a story about a stable family man whose life comes unraveled all at once. It doesn't matter that these things rarely happen in reality because it's so tantalizing to wonder what it would be like to wake up to a new life - to wake up as a new person.

Directed by Udayan Prasad and written by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), My Son focuses on the marginal world of Parvez (Om Puri), a Pakistani living in a grimy English city. Though he has been in England for 25 years, Parvez has risen no higher than a cab driver. But his son, Farid (Akbar Kurtha), is engaged to the daughter of the local police chief, much to the delight of Parvez and his traditional wife Minoo (Gopai Desai). They believe the union will signal their final acceptance into English culture.

But Farid unaccountably breaks off the engagement, and in dismay Parvez confides in one of his regular fares, a prostitute named Bettina (Rachel Griffiths). It is only by degrees that Parvez realizes that his son has joined a fundamentalist Islamic sect. Farid invites an exploitative priest and his entourage to live in the family's house, and it is not long before the group has taken control of the household, forcing Minoo to take refuge in the kitchen and swamping Parvez with debts.

In the meantime, a visiting German businessman (Stellan Skarsgard) with a taste for cocaine and call girls is hiring Parvez's services not only as driver but also as procurer - and his favorite partner, as it turns out, is Bettina. In the course of sharing confidences, Parvez and Bettina are surprised to find that they have enough in common to form the foundation for a relationship. But Farid's sect has begun a campaign to drive the prostitutes, including Bettina, out of the neighborhood.

My Son uses this claustrophobic chain of events to trace Parvez's "fall" from straight-arrow to a man who has only his future in front of him. The movie's droll style is occasionally reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, and Parvez resembles that character in his essential good-naturedness and resilience. He is both agonized and relieved by the changes that are shredding his life, and he is wise enough to throw up the reins once he realizes that it is out of his control. Om Puri's performance as Parvez is detailed and pure - you can see the contradictory emotions crossing his face in alternating waves - and, with his rough complexioned but stoic face, he makes a convincing survivor. The sight of him sleeping spoon fashion with Bettina - she marble white and slim, he paunchy and brown - may seem like a conceit in the telling, but by the end of the film we know exactly what it was that drew the English prostitute to this man.

My Son the Fanatic is an ambivalent mixture of drama and genteel satire that doesn't always work; at times I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but not in a good way. Despite the busy story line and occasional rowdy scene, the film's tone grows muffled and heavy, which winds up diluting what otherwise would be potent scenes. The climactic set piece, a riot in which the stray ends of Parvez's life curl around and touch each other, conveyed no more menace than a staged media event; it seemed like an utterly safe place to walk through, with none of the crazed volatility of, say, the gymnasium riot in The Boxer.

But Om Puri's portrait of a middle-aged man who realizes that he has been leading someone else's life is a wonderful thing to behold. And the film's final shot - a rapturous image of contented uncertainty - may make us yearn for a new life ourselves, with all the heartbreak that may bring.

My son the fanaticAre the parents to blame when a child of the west turns Islamist extremist? Matt Seaton reports

Matt Seaton The Guardian, Wednesday January 2 2002 Article historyAbout this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday January 02 2002 on p6 of the Comment & features section. It was last updated at 01:07 on January 02 2002. 'He's not a bad lad," said Robin Reid, father of Richard Reid, the 28-year-old "shoe bomber" from Brixton. What father, in his predicament, could say anything else?

Yet the pathos of that statement, almost comic in its English understatement, is painful to witness: though every parent will understand Reid's reflexive loyalty to his child, it runs counter to the evidence. Richard Reid believes in an extreme brand of Islam which made him willing to kill himself along with 197 crew and passengers on American Airlines flight 63 on December 19. A farewell note to his mother, Lesley Hughes, confirmed his readiness to die for the cause, ominously warning: "You will never see me again. You had better all convert to Islam."

If the story sounded familiar, it was. For several weeks reporters and commentators had pored over what could be discovered about the American Taliban fighter, 20-year-old John Walker Lindh, captured after the prisoners' insurrection at Qala-i-Jhangi, the fort near Mazar-i-Sharif. The question that obsessed them all was what could have turned a smart kid from a well-to-do background in suburban California into an Islamist extremist, fighting for his country's sworn enemy in Afghanistan.

The answer most people found was two-fold, or rather, two sides of the same coin: the faddism of "Bay Area culture" and excessively liberal parenting.

Ronald Kuby, the lawyer who coincidentally represented