West Is West is a trip in the wrong direction

Salford lad: 13-year-old Sajid (Aqib Khan) is a reluctant visitor to rural Pakistan
10 April 2012

"Fook off, Mowgli!," says 13-year-old Sajid (Aqib Khan) to a friendly native when forced by his father, George (Om Puri), to visit the family he deserted in rural Pakistan. The boy is Salford-born and bred, and thinks the country his father came from is somewhere near Poland on the map.

That's the chief conceit of this belated successor to East Is East, winner of the Evening Standard's Best British Film award in 1999. Dad wants the boy to become a good Muslim and respect his forebears. But George finds he's almost as British as his son by now and realises that bullying him only covered up his own mistakes.

Not that Salford in the Seventies was exactly a comfortable place for Pakistanis. His son gets bullied at school and his British wife (Linda Bassett) is ignored by some for deserting her race.

Directed this time by Andy De Emmony, this is not as funny or as lively as the original, and rather more sentimental, but it still fires on a good few cylinders and contains performances from Khan, Puri and Bassett that transcend an ordinary screenplay.

Most of the action takes place in Pakistan, where the villagers seem rather nicer to foreigners than the British, and the subplot includes a wedding between his older son, Maneer, and a local girl, and a rose-tinted view of things. No matter, the performances sustain West Is West, which, in its simple, direct way proposes that we are all rather like each other, so we might as well like each other too.

West is West

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