Directed by:
Mira NairCinematography:
Declan QuinnComposer:
Michael AndrewsCast:
Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Nelsan Ellis, Martin Donovan, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Haluk Bilginer, Adil Hussain, Victor Slezak (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
We begin in 2011 in Lahore. At an outdoor café a Pakistani man named Changez tells Bobby, an American journalist, about his experiences in the United States. Roll back ten years, and we find a younger Changez fresh from Princeton, seeking fortune and glory on Wall Street. The American Dream seems well within his grasp, complete with a smart and gorgeous artist girlfriend, Erica. But when the Twin Towers are attacked, a cultural divide slowly begins to crack open between Changez and Erica. Changez's dream soon begins to slip into nightmare: profiled, wrongfully arrested, strip-searched and interrogated, he is transformed from a well-educated, upwardly mobile businessman to a scapegoat and perceived enemy. With time, he begins to hear the call of his own homeland. Taking us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story about conflicting ideologies where perception and suspicion have the power to determine life or death. (official distributor synopsis)
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As a first thing, it caught my attention that Kate Hudson went dark-haired and surprisingly, it meant that I didn't dislike her right from the start. Could this be the key to success? As it turns out, no. This is a rather simple, or rather cliché, romance that is only spiced up by the fact that the man in this romance is Arab and most of the significant events happen against the backdrop of September 11, 2001. This leads to automatic sympathy for the hero, on the other hand, there is a reason for it. Americans were truly paranoid. However, only two scenes present this. The rest is a quite transparent drama that has an excessive length.
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I really did not understand what the fundamentalist was doing here. While I will never understand the contemporary world of Muslims, on the other hand, I accept that they are also human beings, just like the rest of us, and that they also may or may not think at least partly reasonably. This movie pretends to be terribly objective and deliberately does not side with anyone. Somehow it moves through an area it doesn’t want to dig into and comfortably leaves it at the end of the journey. As a result, it is neither funny nor interesting.
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Photo © Rialto Distribution
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