Tradição é Tradição

Three teenagers are sitting in front of a TV, enjoying their large helpings of pork sausage and bacon. Suddenly they hear a door opening and immediately start cleaning up all of the dishes and unsuccessfully try to get rid of the fumes of grilled bacon and sausages that billowed through the whole house. This is, of course, not depicting the normal life of three teenagers, but taken from the film "East Is East" by Damien O'Donnell. It deals with the story of a family in England in the 1970s with a Pakistani father (multi-facetted enacted by Om Puri) who still believes in his Pakistani traditions and his Muslim religion and an English mother (great performance by Linda Bassett) who tries to give her seven children as much freedom as all of their "fully English" friends enjoy. This movie was labeled as a Comedy both in theaters and on DVD or VHS, but anybody looking for light-hearted entertainment fitting for a Saturday night will be hugely disappointed. This movie is out to teach the viewer about how difficult it is to get two very different cultures to not only co-exist peacefully next to each other, but to merge them to create a new one. The script by Ayub Khan-Din, who also wrote the book and the stage version of this movie, does have its funny moments, and the whole cast, including the children, is in for some good laughs. But the more intense moments are those where the viewer has to deal with outbursts of domestic violence or things like arranged marriages that seem so far away and cruel to Westerners. The cast shows its brilliance in those intimate moments. Even though the script might sometimes appear to be too ambitious – there are just too many characters all developing in a very distinct manner and all crucial to the movie – the movie can be recommended to anyone who is not looking for a standard comedy and is willing to have his views on life challenged.