Mira Nair’s adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid begins with the haunting Kangana, performed live by the Farid Ayaz-Abu Muhammad qawwal group.
We see glimpses of the Pakistani elite, in whose houses such performances are regularly staged, at whose parties the young men of the house arrange for bootlegged liquor, families whose glorious past is patched together by imported dollars.
This is the home of Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), the protagonist whose career begins with a $80,000 job at a management consulting firm.
The song drowns out a kidnapping in another part of town, and we know that Changez, who checks his phone surreptitiously, is somehow involved. Later, a light-eyed child delivers a package marked ‘US Embassy’ to a door.
Thus begins the transition of Hamid’s novel on alienation into a Mira Nair thriller.
The novel deals with Changez’s identity at one level - as a non-resident Pakistani, as an immigrant in America, as the Pakistani boyfriend of a white girl, as the foreign-return to Lahore, as the ruthless young business analyst, as the firebrand young professor.
At another level, it deals with the xenophobia that took over America, and even other parts of the Caucasian world, post 9/11.
Strangely, this fostered a sense of unity among those discriminated against - Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, divided by religion, united by colour of skin. This is Mira Nair’s focus in the film, and it is allowed to remain an undercurrent, stoked into our reckoning by a couple of incidents.
The book doesn’t offer enough scope for a film if adapted word-for-word, and so Nair decides to expand it.
This means a lot of things that remained charmingly vague in the book become unequivocal on celluloid, but that fits nicely into the change of genre, offering something new even to those who have read the book.
The location of Changez’s final assignment is changed to a publishing house in Turkey, which helps bring in the idea of a Great Islamic Empire, once known for the cadences of its poetry rather than its rhetoric.
The presence of Om Puri in the cast makes for a lovely in-joke against India. He tells his daughter (Meesha Shafi), who stars in a Pakistani Bond spoof, “Who will marry you now? Go to India. Yeh sab chalta hai wahaan pe.” Within the larger canvas of the plot, the film examines relationships in the Khan family. The most beautiful of these moments occur at a wedding, before the song Dil jalaane ki baat karte ho, sung hauntingly by novelist Ali Sethi (who also makes a guest appearance in the film).
Riz Ahmed is the revelation, slipping easily into character.
Sadly, an oddly podgy Kate Hudson doesn’t fit either into the skin or sentiment of her character, which brings the film down considerably.
The Verdict: Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a clever adaptation, using cinematic devices to expand the scope of the novel.
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Liev Shrieber, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Om
Puri, Shabana Azmi, Meesha Shafi, Adil Hussain and others
Director: Mira Nair