Good-Hearted, Wrongheaded

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Sometimes he's choleric. Sometimes he's obsequious. Always he's a man lost and trying desperately to find his way through a strange country in which the natives can barely see him through their veils of contempt.

He's a wonderful actor named Om Puri--a pockmarked, middle-age Pakistani. A year ago, in My Son, the Fanatic, he was a taxi driver in a grim industrial town in the north of England. Now he's back in a similar hardscrabble environment, this time as George, the proprietor of a fish-and-chips shop in a working-class London suburb in the '70s. He long ago married an Englishwoman (Linda Bassett, in a splendidly grounded performance). But he is determined that his numerous progeny embrace tradition--especially when it comes to love. As East Is East opens, one of his sons is bolting an arranged marriage, bringing shame on George, who did not happen to notice that the boy was gay. George's attempt to marry two more of his kids to a pair of plug-ugly sisters comes to similar grief.

The film, based on a play by actor Ayub Khan Din, is the first feature by director Damien O'Donnell. It is billed as a comedy, and George's frustrations with his elusive, secretive family are surely funny. But Puri makes him more touching than a crude family tyrant. There is something lonely in his bustling blindness, something right about his resistance to sleazy modernism. He's both wrongheaded and good-hearted, and the actor and the film make something fine, winning and memorable of that conflict.

--By Richard Schickel