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Udayan Prasad Examines Global Issues Through A Humble Man

Aseem Chhabra

A few years ago, British-Indian filmmaker Udayan Prasad read a short story written by his friend and colleague Hanif Kureishi. The story, My Son the Fanatic, had been published in the popular American literary publication, New Yorker and Kureishi was trying to explore whether it had the potential to be made into a movie.

"It was a contemporary story and what attracted me to it was that it tackled global issues, but through the life of a humble man -- a Pakistani taxi driver in a provincial English town," Prasad said recently in an interview from London.

"I think it is a very current story, but it is not done in a didactic or a polemic way. That is the kind of films I like to make, which are about contemporary life."

My Son the Fanatic -- the film, based on Kureishi's short story and screenplay, and directed by Prasad was shown last summer at the Cannes Film Festival. Later, it played to critical acclaim in several major European cities. Now, a year later, the film is being released in the United States by the leading independent film company, Miramax, whose other credits include box office hits and Oscar-winning films like The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love and Pulp Fiction. The film opened in two movie houses in New York and two in Los Angeles, and will expand its run to more than 20 cities in the next week weeks.

Prasad's film stars Om Puri as Parvez, the cab driver whose attempts to assimilate British culture are rebuffed by his fundamentalist son, played by a young actor, Akbar Kurtha (seen in Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach). Prasad referred to Om Puri as one of the top character actors of our times and compared him to Gene Hackman.

The film's international cast also includes the Oscar-nominated Australian actress Rachel Griffiths (Muriel's Wedding and Hillary and Jackie) in the role of Bettina, a prostitute who provides emotional support to Parvez, as he becomes increasingly estranged from his family.

Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard (Good Will Hunting and Breaking The Waves) stars as Schitz -- a hedonistic German businessman.

Prasad said he and Kureishi had talked about collaborating on a project since the mid-'80s, when the British-Pakistani writer's first screenplay My Beautiful Launderette, was made into a film. Kureishi then went on to write two more screenplays -- Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and London Kills Me, which was also his first and only directorial venture.

After the critical and box office failure of London Kills Me ("I don't think he is in a hurry to repeat that experience," Prasad said), Kureishi switched his focus back to writing -- novels, plays and short stories.

"When Hanif approached me with his short story and I said yes, it could be made into a film, we started a very collaborative effort," Prasad said. "There was a lot of talking all through during the scripting stage and shooting of the film. I directed the film, but I would like to think of it as a partnership."

Prasad's first theatrical film -- Brothers in Trouble -- made in 1996, was based on Abdullah Hussein's novel The Return Journey.

It also starred Om Puri in the lead and the Delhi stage actor Pawan Malhotra, as an illegal Pakistani immigrant in England. However, he said tackling the issues of Asian immigrants in England for the second time (in My Son the Fanatic) was a "mere coincidence".

"I suppose, what the two films have in common is the theme of belonging," he said. "It forces the character that Om Puri plays (in My Son the Fanatic) to ask himself, where does he belong and what he wants out of life. And that's the theme that interests me."

Born in India, Prasad migrated to England with his family at the age of nine. He said he considers himself to be fortunate, in that he is comfortable in both south Asian and the British societies. He added that it was important for first time immigrant filmmakers to tell stories that were close to their own experiences.

"You should tell stories about things that you know," he said. "If you make films about things that you do not know, those are second-hand stories. And it becomes apparent. There has to be something in any story that gives it that dramatic force, the truth."

A graduate of Britain's National Film and Television School, Prasad worked on documentary films before moving onto narrative cinema. His earlier works, included a documentary on the Pakistani community in Britain -- A Corner of A Foreign Field and Invisible Ink, a film about writers from the Indian subcontinent in England.

"I have worked with the Pakistani and Indian communities in England," Prasad said. "I know the psyche of the immigrant and I know about the conflicts that have arisen between the generations."

One of the central themes of Kureishi's works has been racism in Britain and its impact on the writer's protagonists. In My Son the Fanatic, Parvez visits a nightclub with Schitz and Bettina, where he is insulted by a stand-up comic, who calls him Salman Rushdie.

Prasad emphasized that in showing the stand-up comedian in his act, Kureishi was not necessarily pointing his finger at the entire British society and calling it blatantly racist. He said given a chance, the comic would have picked on a woman or a black person or even a disabled person.

"The mindset of the stand-up comedians is not to celebrate human idiosyncrasies or the foibles of our existence," he said. "They are there to make the most vicious jokes at the expense of those present there.

"There is no getting away from the fact that racism exists in just about every society, even in India," Prasad said. "No doubt, the non-white communities in Britain feel that racism affects their lives." However, he added that of all countries in the West that he had visited, "easily, Britain is the most tolerant".

When Prasad came to Britain as a child, the country still had what he described as the "empire mentality". However, he was quick to add that that mindset is now gone. "The idea that 'you should go back to your home country' is no more," he said. "People realize that the immigrants are here to stay."

For his next few projects though, Prasad plans to move away from stories of south Asian immigrants -- themes that have preoccupied him for the last several years. One project is an adaptation of a Lope De Vega novel -- Lost In A Mirror, set in 16th century Italy.

The second is a comedy set in the world of vaudevilles and music halls -- Britain in 1959-1960. It is a story of a magician who cannot reconcile to the fact that television is destroying his world.

Like Shekhar Kapur, and Night Shyamalan, Prasad is now prepared to step into the second phase of his filmmaking career, focusing on non-south Asian characters and moving out of the realm of the immigrant experience.

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