A Pakistani taxi driver in Britain (Om Puri) is plagued by a bad cosmic joke that seems co-written by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis: his son, rather than becoming an unrecognizable assimilate, turns into a jihad-embracing Muslim fundamentalist. At the same time, the warmth of a white hooker (Rachel Griffiths) beckons, to the chagrin and hissing tongues of his local countrymen.
The writer Hanif Kureishi's onetime Benetton smugness has mellowed into ripe colors of rue, mockery and regret as he eases into middle age, and this adaptation of his short story is a lovely, surprisingly beautifully shot, sneakily haunting small movie. The dialogue sometimes has a novelish explicitness, and the performances are variable--Puri sometimes drifts into F. Murray Abraham terrain, but he has an amazing, craggy, pain-absorbent face. But the movie has a real subject: the ways in which postmod culture-hybridity isn't always a rainbow-colored day at the beach. And the warmth amid desperation of the central relationship suggests what Neil Jordan's MONA LISA might have been without the smoky-sax romanticism.
The sad thing about seeing this movie was that, after Miramax gave the movie one of their unceremonious heave-hos (par for the course for their good movies), the audience, unblanketed by buzz, hype, an aura of hot-ticket, reacted as shruggingly as critics seem to have. Too bad: MY SON THE FANATIC evokes the sweet, melancholy fatalism of seventies pictures like THE NICKEL RIDE and STRAIGHT TIME. It has the atmosphere of an overcast crime picture without the crime. And it has at least a handful of real, breathing people in it--as rare an occurrence these days as a flight of the dodo.
