Culture clash in “Blinded by the Light”

In “Blinded by the Light,” hopeful teenaged writer Javed Khan, a British-Pakistani, writes an essay about his idol Bruce Springsteen titled ‘My American Dream in Luton’. The essay is the tipping point for a long gestating argument he’s been having with his father who is sceptical of his Javed’s literary dreams and his love for American music. “Everything that’s bad in Britain is worse in America,” his father argues. “Everything that’s good in Britain is better in America,” Javed responds. The year is 1987, Thatcher is in power in Britain, the National Front’s overt far-right Nazism terrorises persons of colour and for Javed, the promise of a world where anyone can succeed makes America compelling. It’s the only section in “Blinded by the Light” that seems to date the recently released film, feeling apt and yet out-of-place. It’s 2019 and we’re still dealing with Nazism, far-right terrorist groups, except today it’s America that’s overrun with the Neo-Nazi apologists in the streets as much as anywhere else. But, even with that ironically out-of-sync arc, Gurinder Chadha’s film, a riff on a familiar coming-of-age trope, resonates with charm and an earnest sentimentality that makes a winning balm for the current movie season.

The film’s log-line, and its title, indicates its allegiance to Bruce Springsteen. The set-up seems set to interrogate how does a Pakistani immigrant in Britain come to be devoted to Bruce Springsteen of all people? But this description belies the way that “Blinded by the Light” is par for the course for Chadha, who’s most internationally recognised work, “Bend it like Beckham,” represents her decades-long interest in the culture clashes of Asian, especially Pakistani families, living in England. What it means to be an immigrant and what it means to be British are themes she’s been examining since her feature film debut in 1993, “Bhaji on the Beach”, the first full-length feature by a British-Asian woman. In this way, Springsteen is the variable rather than the constant in “Blinded by the Light”. The story here is larger than the music legend.

Javed, his two sisters and his mother are all trying to make ends meet while living up to the hopes of the dogmatic father-figure of the house, who has found his hopeful dreams of life in England less successful than he imagined. Javed, already unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps, develops a musical kinship with Springsteen’s trenchant-outsider ideology when he begins sixth-form college. Springsteen becomes the catalyst for Javed’s coming-of-age, his confidence in his literary abilities and the decisive point for a severing in the already tentative relationship with his father. All the while, England is suffering from record unemployment, a burgeoning and shameless far-right racism and culture shocks throughout. As far as coming-of-age stories go, we anticipate the beats that “Blinded by the Light” is setting up early on – the teacher-as-encourager trope, the romance-as-salve one but “Blinded by the Light” is making a point with these tropes, in typical Chadha form, emphasising how Western literary (and cinematic) tropes can diverge and converge for an immigrant in a white world.

And Chadha is lucky that the openness of her story, so earnest and unashamed, is mirrored in her lead actor – newcomer Viveik Kalra. In an early scene, Javed listens to his first Springsteen record and Chadha complements the moment by having the major words of the songs crawl across the screen, as if to punctuate their importance. It’s a nice touch for those unversed in Springsteen, literally spelling out the lyrics for us. But she doesn’t really need to. Kalra is good enough that just watching his face contort we understand exactly how he’s feeling – that teenage feeling of finding an artist that inexplicably speaks to you beyond all others. It’s that moment on the precipice between teenager and young-adult that “Blinded by the Light” is playing at, Chadha’s film feels young, and dorky and emotional just as we would expect a teenager to be. It makes for slight awkwardness when the romance plot, cute but not very dynamic, sometimes takes up the space of arcs that seem more intriguing. But, it seems apt for a teenage life.

Kalra is backed by an able cast, British comedian Kulvinder Ghir gets a lot to work with as a Pakistani coming to grips with his dashed hopes of success in Britain. But, it’s Meera Ganatra in her feature film role that leaves the biggest impression as Javed’s long-suffering mother. It’s the focus on the male experience that differentiates “Blinded by the Light” from Chadha’s typical focus on the immigrant experience for women, but Ganatra is doing wonders on the edge of the story here adding a depth to the crisis of a woman trapped between her husband and son and which dominates the last act of the story. She has a scene opposite Ghir at the end that evokes shades of Katharine Hepburn’s confrontation scene with Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”. And it emphasises the way that Chadha’s thoughtfulness and care for the complexity of family dynamics reveal her as a necessary filmmaker.

You probably already know what that last act will be. But it doesn’t matter. The film may be even better for it. In a mid-film sequence, Javed and his sister dance to South-Asian music in a club. It’s not Javed’s scene and, out-of-place, he pulls out his Walkman and puts on his headphones to listen to some Bruce. The sequence imagines the entire club, all South-Asian, many in traditional garb, dancing to Springsteen. But then the moment cuts. Javed realises he needs to be in this moment. So, he nixes the headphones. It’s a small moment but one that effectively sums up what Chadha is so interested in. How does one even learn to blend disparate cultures? The film does not have a definitive answer about this but it does offer a thoughtful, hopeful suggestion that it could be possible. And it’s an idea that feels apt and necessary in 2019. “Blinded by the Light” is all about the eighties, but it’s resounding with all the freshness of today.

“Blinded by the Light” is now playing at local theatres.