Change Your Image
greenwood-alex
Reviews
Anita & Me (2002)
Offensive
Anita and Me seems to be little more than an excuse for Meera Syal, the author of the novel and screenplay, to air her prejudices, grievances and general antipathy towards the English. The general sentiment of Indian superiority over the English in this film is foul.
The English people in this film are portrayed as overweight, violent, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, engaging in child neglect, stupid, uneducated, racist, ugly, eating poor food, and dim-witted -- tellingly, only by turning to Indian culture can the local priest be "redeemed" at the end of the film.
By contrast, the Indian family are beautiful, clever, educated, can speak many languages, are caring and loving parents, and grammar-school fodder. The film is so insidiously prejudicial that I am astonished the BBC funded it at all. Had it been the other way round, an English family in an Indian community depicted this way, the film would have been seen as racist.
There were a few moments where my eyebrow shot so far up my forehead, I thought it would lodge in my hairline. First, the gossip scene between the women at the Divali celebration -- undertext: the English are dirty and promiscuous -- and the men -- undertext: English women are prostitutes. Second, the meal with Anita where Neema's family lie to her about cutlery -- undertext: the English are so stupid, you can make them do anything.
But the underlying contempt towards anything English -- even English weddings are an object of scorn -- is evident all the way through the film. The character of Anita was drawn so appallingly -- almost the fallen woman trope -- that I finished the film feeling angry.
This is not a "Bend it like Beckham" where the humour is focused on loving exaggerations of a community's behaviour and customs from somebody within that community, and is a film about two girls from different backgrounds coming together. Instead, Anita and Me seems to convey that a form of cultural apartheid is inevitable, as the English are almost an version of the Indian Untouchable caste, and this is underscored by a thinly-veiled series of attacks upon the film's "other" community: the English.
I felt Anita and Me is a hate-filled, grievance-based piece of work. On that basis, the BBC should not have funded its production.
The Tenants (2005)
Doesn't work
Watching The Tenants has been a interesting experience for me. It is the first film I have ever seen where I have shuttled at speed through parts of the (non)action - and I can normally watch anything from turgid action movies to Serbo-Croat indie and find them fascinating.
The Tenants is frustratingly sluggish and over-orchestrated. One of the main problems of the script is there is little realistic character dialogue, apart from the set pieces where characters 'collide' in a very structured setting (to make this work, the film needed to feel more conceptual, which it didn't). This leads to a lack of realistic character development; everyone seems two-dimensional.
The worse for this is the character of Bill Spear, aka Snoop Dogg. I found his characterization very uncomfortable and very unsympathetic. At one point, I even stopped the film because I got so annoyed by the character's aggressive, violent and monotonal delivery, the lack of any other personality layer apart from that of the reactionary "on" switch (which gets really predictable after a while) and I so desperately wanted him to have some redeeming qualities. However, one reason for this jar might be the nebulous time scape of the film (supposedly 70s, it feels and looks more early noughties). If it had been more securely fixed in the 70s, his character might have seemed more understandable.
The lighting of the film was also awkward. All the way through, the soundtrack attempts to provide a certain gritty, jazz-infused atmosphere that just did not come off, largely because the set was too well-lit.
The Tenants, to me, is an unbelievable film. It doesn't depict real people or propose any interesting ways of thinking about race, identity or the life of a writer, be they white or black.
Strangely, I came away with the feeling that this project needed David Lynch; his eerie, clastrophobic and obsessive look and feel would have lifted both the actors and the script into something quite remarkable.