Tag: Gurinder Chadha

Blinded by the Light

Posted on by victorfraga

Take the cheesiest film you have ever seen, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it. Blinded by the Light is one of these films so formulaic and thoroughly doused in saccharine that it could give you a heart attack. Yet, it’s surprisingly delightful to watch, even if you are not a fan of Bruce Springsteen (which I’m not, quite the opposite). Oh, the sweet dangers of sugar!

The year is 1987 and our protagonist is 17-year old British Pakistani Javed. He lives in the lacklustre and soulless town of Luton (incidentally, voted the “ugliest” town in the UK a few years ago), and watching cars drive past on the motorway from the hilltop is one of his biggest sources of entertainment. He puts pen to paper in an attempt to free himself from his humdrum existence. But he has no confidence in his words. His conservative Pakistani father believes that writing is not a job. It’s his school teacher who encourages him to carry on with it.

Racism is widespread and even normalised. A pig’s head is exhibited outside the local mosque, Javed is spat on on the street and made to move tables in a restaurant in order to make room for a group of white thugs, children urinate through the letter slot of Javed’s house, an his walls are vandalised with xenophobic graffiti. The far-right takes to the streets in order to demonstrate against “Pakis”. His family seem mostly unfazed. They never report the crimes to the police, instead proceeding to clean the urine and the graffiti themselves. They are conformists. They tacitly agree to their marginalised position in society.

Javed’s father insists that his son is Pakistani (despite being born in the UK) and that he will never be British. He demands that the young man stops writing. “How many Pakistani writers do you know?”, he asks. He believes that Javed should not challenge the established orthodoxies of his culture. He also believes that Javed should not date a white girl, and instead promises to find him an arranged marriage.

One day, a Sikh friend introduces Javed to Bruce Springsteen by lending him two cassette tapes. He immediately connects with the music. “It’s as if he’s talking directly to me”, he puts its succinctly. “I’ve just popped your Bruce cherry”, his friend boasts. The gleeful and optimistic lyrics about dreaming and self-empowerment progressively take over his life. The words pop up of the screen, fly and swirl around his head. At times, they are projected on the walls outside. It’s the content of these songs that will inspire Javed and instil his poems with colour and vibrancy. He eventually wins a contest in school with his poem “A Runaway American Dream in Luton”, named after the Springsteen song “Runaway American Dream”, and the prize could change his life forever. The problem is that his father isn’t too pleased about it.

It may come as a disappointment to many British people that the British Pakistani teen found inspiration in an American composer whose most famous album is entitled “Born in the U.S.A”. In fact, this is not a creative choice. Blinded by the Light (which is also the name of a Springsteen song) is based on a real story. And the fact that Springsteen is not British is not an issue. This is a film about universality of music and dreams. Springsteen could be American, Brazilian, Italian or Japanese. The identity of the movie itself is rather international. The production is British, the singer is American, the characters are Pakistani and director is Kenyan.

From a language and format perspective, Blinded by the Light is a squeaky clean, highly sanitised movie. This is an easily digestible and earnest movie with its heart at the right place, plus a a clearcut message of tolerance, diversity and racial reconciliation. Exactly as you would expect from a Gurinder Chadha movie. It’s worth a trip to the cinema. It’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face. But it probably won’t convert you into a fan of the Bruce Springsteen. Be grateful!

Blinded by the Light is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 9th, with previews across the country in the two weeks preceding the official launch. On VoD on Monday, December 9th.

Viceroy’s House

Posted on by victorfraga

Tasking a coloniser with organising the independence of its colony is the equivalent to assigning Josef Fritzl with the social reintegration of his kids. The outcome is inevitably disastrous, yet the captor will never cease to believe that his victims are to blame. The British-born film director of Punjabi Sikh Kenyan Asian origin Gurinder Chadha opens her film with a quote from Walter Benjamin: “history is written by the victors”, gently reminding British viewers that they must rewrite they history in order to acknowledge the gargantuan atrocities of the past.

The importance of Viceroy’s House as a historical register cannot overstated. It effectively busts the myth that the Partition of India was necessary in order to prevent a bloodshed, instead revealing that it was established as convenient tool for hegemonic and oil interests in the Middle East. It would be much easier to exert control over a small and conservative Pakistan than over a socialist-leaning India, the movie reveals.

The last Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville) is constructed as a dignified man who cares for the people of India, while the British establishment is presented as far more devious. Churchill describes Gandhi as a “half-naked fakir” and Indians as “primitive”, conveniently blaming them for their own woes and dodging all sorts of responsibility for the bloody consequences of independence and Partition.

Films dealing with the Partition are few and far between, and most British people lack the knowledge of what happened back then. In a recent interview with DMovies, Ken Loach said: “The British Empire was founded on land conquests, enslaving people, transporting them to other countries, stealing people’s natural resources, exploitation, brutality, concentration camps. We do need to tell the truth about that”. This is exactly what Chadha does.

The movie reveals the Partition of India was the largest forced displacement of people in the history of mankind, with 14 million being moved across the newly formed Pakistan and India in a matter of weeks. More than a million people died on the journey, where cholera and other diseases were widespread. And it wasn’t just people that were divided, everything had to be allocated on a 5-1 proportion (Pakistan took 20%, while India kept the remaining 80%). The absurdity of the situation is illustrated when an encyclopaedia collection has to be split, and it must be decided whether Pakistan should keep the “A-E” or the “S-Z” part.

Viceroy’s House is a very big achievement from a historical perspective, but sadly not from a cinematic and aesthetic one. The palaces and the costumes are impeccable, but strangely so is poverty. The slums are extremely clean, and penury and disease is represented with smudge of coal on the face and the arms. There is also a romance in the film, but it’s never clear whether that’s primary or secondary. There are plenty of artificial tears, but very little chemistry between the two actors.

The extremely positive portrayal of Lord Mountbatten also comes across as a little strange. It is widely known that the Viceroy hurried the Partition so that he could return to his senior navy courses, yet here he is presented in the film as someone who was “used” by the British government. And while Churchill is denounced, Clement Attlee’s role in the tragic events is almost entirely neglected.

The world premiere of Viceroy’s House took place in Berlin, when this piece was originally written in 2016. The Partition’s 70th anniversary toook place on August 15th, 2017. On BritBox on Thursday, May 12th (2022). On Netflix on Wednesday, July 6th (2022).