My Son the Fanatic

There is an unwritten law, even in film, that young people are rebellious and progressive, while older people increasingly retreat into their traditional positions. In My Son the Fanatic, based on a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi (who came to fame in the eighties with his scripts for Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid), the roles are reversed. Protagonist Parvez is a Pakistani-London taxi-driver whose son starts to behave strangely. He dumps his white fiancée – daughter of a local police inspector – and sells his possessions. At first Parvez thinks that drugs are involved, but then it becomes apparent that his son has become a fanatical fundamentalist Moslem. Parvez’ wife seems to support her son and detests the world in which Parvez earns his money. Parvez becomes alienated from his family and falls in love with the prostitute Bettina – a situation not without danger for someone living in the midst of the Pakistani community and largely dependent on it. Then German tourist Schitz (Stellan Skarsgård) appears on the scene as a representative of Western Hedonism in its most extreme form. He has his own plays with Bettina. There is a clash over the Asian kitchen table between Islamic fundamentalism and Western Hedonism in a film that, despite the complexity of the issue, also has a romantic turn.