EAST IS EAST – MOVIE ANALYSIS Written by Charlotte Lisa Bateman, 12STA 23. 03. 13 The movie East is East is a drama-comedy film by Ayub Khan-Din, and is directed by Damien O? Donnel. The movie takes place in Salford, Manchester.
The year was 1971, and it is about the family Khan. The main characters in the movie are George, who originally comes from Pakistan, his wife Ella who originally comes from Britain, and their 7 children, Nazir, Abdul, Tariq, Saleem, Maneer, Meenah and the youngest, Sajid. The family Kahn owns a fish and chips shop on the corner.The movie is about George Kahn who is a man of Islam and traditions. He tries his best to raise his 7 children, as well as his wife, to be good Muslims. But when he has to please his British wife Ellsa and the Pakistani community, the job is not easy.
In the beginning of the movie he wants his oldest son Nazir to be married, so he arranged a marriage for him. But at the altar Nazir gets cold feet, and rejects to get married and leaves the bride at the altar. George Khan, Nazir’s father gets furious as Nazir brought shame over the whole family.Georges world seems to collapse, but marriage is still on his mind.
So he decides to arrange a meeting with Mr. Shah and his two doughters to meet his second and third sons, Tariq and Abdul. In this way by marrying two of his other sons, he would gain the respect he lost when his other son did not marry. George gave his promise to Mr. Shah that his sons will marry his daughters, but Tariq and Abdul does not know about the arrange marriage until the youngest son Sjit spills it by telling them about what he heard when George told Ella the plans.
Ella now finds herself caught between her husband and the children, and when everyone knows about their father that has secretly been arranging their marriages; the rebel within the children comes out. In the end, Tariz gets angry because he finds out of his father plans of the marriage. So he takes Saleem and Menah with him and runs away to Nazir. When they come to Nazir, they find out that he is homosexual and that the reason why he did not want to get married was because of that.
When George’s two sons tell him that they don’t want to continue the traditions of his own Islamic world, he gets furious and violent. Because Ella stood up for the kids for the first time, he gets so angry that he hits her and one of his sons. The family was living in fear of their father, so they had to put a stop to it by telling him exactly how they felt about the way he was treating them, and that made him realize how he had been behaving towards his family. So that was a summary of the movie without me revealing the ending!Something I liked in the movie was how the director of the movie had put the different cultures together in a nice way that we could see that it’s possible to be surrounded by other people with different culture and values.
For example in the movie there were neighbors that were Christians, but still there was a lot of Pakistani background music. And I think that was a small detail of the film, but still great and noticeable that got you thinking over the situation. Also the fact that the movie involves around difficult topics like arranged marriages, religion and identity, makes it a brilliant story.I also liked the way the director uses the cameras to make the viewers see things from different perspectives. He does a great job by for example the makeover George Kahn goes through in the director’s camera.
My opinion of the movie is that it was an interesting film that informs us about topics that are important and relevant today, such as religion, arranged marriages and identity. Some of the scenes I found quite sad and almost brought a tear to my eye, for example when their father reacts with violence.But even though the movie deals with many important and serious topics, there is still some humor in it witch I found made the movie even better! We come across tons of humoristic comments, especially from Sajid who is the youngest of them all and does not always know the right things to say. All in all it was a good movie with a good story. It had some sad scenes and some funny scenes, as well as I got an aspect on how it might be to have a family with different culture, and different views of how to handle difficult situations.
And I think that is what makes the movie so good, is because many people probably can relate to it.
