How far must a man run to escape the long arms of bigotry and ethnic hatred? In No Land’s Man, his first English language film, acclaimed Bangladeshi writer-director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki (Television, Saturday Afternoon) skillfully explores the world-wide plague of white supremacy and the personal identity crisis of a “survivor”. These dead serious themes emerge very gradually from a classic, light-hearted story about how a Pakistani immigrant in New York falls in love with a young Australian waitress. While the cultural clash one sees coming ought to be between the two lovers, it instead shifts to society as a whole in a series of surprise twists that greatly deepen the insight. The film’s double nature makes it a popular festival choice that has already traveled from its bow in Busan to Tallinn to a gala screening Cairo.
Shooting in a variety of languages but mostly in English, Farooki cleverly incorporates the flavor of foreign accents from his mostly Pakistani characters. The first line spoken by the hero Naveen as he gazes out over a rustic hillside cemetery extending to the ocean, is: “This is my most favorite place in Sydney.” During this peaceful opening scene, Naveen mysteriously vanishes before the eyes of his Australian girlfriend Cathy (newcomer Megan Mitchell), and the rest of the film describes why it happens.
Playing a Pakistani Muslim who pretends to be an Indian Hindu to avoid problems while living abroad, Indian star Nawazuddin Siddiqui rides a difficult tragicomic role with cool bravado. A favorite of festival audiences for playing boss Faizal Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur and as the self-effacing trainee in The Lunchbox, here his character is closer to that of a con man, even if his aim is not lucre but survival in a hostile environment. After telling Cathy a towering web of lies about himself, with predictably comic consequences, he finds it hard to walk them back.
At first Naveen’s inventions (most egregiously, that he’s not a Muslim) are corroborated by his cousin Farookh (Vikram Kochhar), now living in Mumbai, with the help of a paid actor playing his dead father. The screenplay goads us to disapprove of his mythmaking which seems targeted, first, at getting a job in a restaurant kitchen, and second, at winning Cathy, a strapping, good-hearted 20-something girl who takes a broad view of people and relationships, and who is a head taller than the 39-year-old Naveen. Though visually, culturally and even sexually they seem mismatched, we’re asked to suspend disbelief and accept them as a solid couple.
Speaking of which, the bedroom scenes give a very clear idea of their sexual passion, except that half the screen is strategically blacked-out. One imagines this is to satisfy Western and South Asian audiences at the same time, but the effect is laughably quaint. As though aware of this, in one scene the camera pans through the darkness to reveal a police officer on his knees, listening to every moan and groan coming from the bed.
This is obviously a fantasy of Naveen’s, originating in an earlier trauma with the immigration police. Pointed at by a hysterical woman on the ferry boat that he is peacefully riding home, the new immigrant is immediately arrested and interrogated as a suspected terrorist. It ends with him getting an ankle monitor strapped to his leg for an indeterminate period of time. This outrageous travesty of civil rights then flips into comedy as Naveen worries that they’re listening to him over a microphone in the monitor, especially in bed.
It is only late in the film that religious persecution escalates from over-zealous ICE cops to a frightening scene of violence at Naveen’s stately family home in Lahore. His family has been targeted by a ferocious mob as “Ahmadis” (from the Ahmadiyyah branch of Islam) and told to leave Pakistan or die. But as Naveen’s sister observes, if they move to India they’ll be discriminated against as Muslims. The clash of religions and ideology recalls the director’s terrorist drama Saturday Afternoon, where death erupts quite senselessly in a quiet Bangladeshi café. These violent scenes are inserted into the American story without undue emphasis but they are, of course, key to understanding why the hero compulsively lies: it’s a survival tactic.
While the direction is confident with the South Asian characters and with the American and Australian settings in general, it leaves a gap where the English speakers are concerned, and they don’t come off very convincingly – for instance, Cathy in her family home with her father and mother, or at the police station conversing with an officer. Naveen is presented with humor and wit, but they don’t get the same treatment, and tend to resemble TV stereotypes.
Adding to the strangeness of the cross-cultural experience is choice of unnatural but highly expressionistic background colors by cinematographers Sheikh Rajibul Islam and Alexey Kosorukov, which look pleasingly modern and eye-catching. The film’s listenable, Western style music is composed by two-time Oscar winner A. R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire), who is also executive producer.
Director, screenwriter: Mostofa Sarwar Farooki
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Megan Mitchell, Tahsan Khan, Eisha Chopra, Kiran Khoje, Vidram Kochhar
Producers: Shrihari Sathe, Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, Nusrat Imrose Tisha, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Anjan Chowdhury, Faridur Reza Sagar
Executive producer: A. R. Rahman
Cinematography: Sheikh Rajibul Islam, Alexey Kosorukov
Production design: Amal Farooki
Costume design: Amal Farooki, Smruti Kamble
Editing: Momin Biswas
Music: A. R. Rahman
Sound design: Ripon Nath
Production companies: Chabial (Bangladesh), Dialectic (U.S.), Bongo (Bangladesh), Magic If Films (India)
Venue: Cairo Intl. Film Festival (Special Presentations)
In English, Urdu, Hindi, French, Bangla
101 minutes
