The reluctant fundamentalist: A reluctant thriller


The reluctant fundamentalist
Staring : Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, Kiefer Sutherland, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi
Rated: 6/10
There is a scene midway in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in which Changez Khan congratulates his friend and co-worker for becoming the Associated President of a blue chip company in which both work. “Congratulations, you will now become associate president,” he tells his Black friend. The friend, looks right back and asks lingeringly: “And what will you become?”
Though there are many defining moments in this film on the complex existence of humans in a complex world, the above-mentioned exchange is the most hard-hitting one. It comes at a time when this Ivy League ‘coloured’ man quits his firm to return to Pakistan and his roots after America, a country he loved, misbehaves with him collectively after 9/11. He is stripped, fingered and questioned for no reason many times. He grows a beard, he thinks back, he tries to fight the onslaught but he fails.
As the reluctant fundamentalist, Riz Ahmed, with his lean face and sunk in eyes, portrays the angst of the entire lot of immigrants for whom the free world of America has become a living monstrosity.
Back home, he becomes a teacher giving anti-American lectures but goodness still remains the basis of his existence. The story goes back and forth in time with Changez recalling his American journey with a lot of anguish, perhaps trying to explain to himself the need to have become so strident.
The acumen of this film lies as much in Riz’s performance as it does in the way Nair has told this story adapted from a book of the same title. The locales have been captured beautifully and the lights of the shady bylanes of what is Lahore are just apt for the depressed mood the film strives on.
Yes, it is slow, yes it is a bit unwieldy but yes it also makes you think, deeply and sadly.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 19 May, 2013

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