(whole lotta spoilers)
It happens to every teenager. At some point during those seven years of constant change and clumsy re-adjustment, a teenager will hear the sound of a voice singing a song that they have never heard before and they will just plain flip the f*ck out. If you are thirteen or fourteen and this has not happened to you yet, be patient, your time will come.
And it, too, will come soon for Javed (Viveik Kalra), the sixteen year old son of a traditional Pakistani father. But, as “Blinded By the Light” plays out its first few scenes, it is clear that Javed is in the “dumps with the mumps” with neither a flip nor a f*ck in sight.
Stuck in the fog of the factory town of Luton, in 1987, during the ruinous reign of Magaret Thatcher, under the thick thumb of his overbearing father, bullied by know nothing Neo-Nazis and, worst yet, without a girlfriend, Javed is living a life that is destined for the clearance bins.
He wants to be a writer. Heck, he kind of is one, already – he’s been scribbling his secret thoughts in the private pages of diary after diary since his early teens. On top of that, his english teacher is impressed by his poems and essays and is poking and prodding him to feed that fire within. Problem is, his father, Malik (Kulvinder Ghir) keeps throwing water on it. Besides, as his father tells it, he’s not horrible like those Pakistani parents who demand that their kids become doctors. Not at all. Malik tells his son that he is very flexible and will also accept him becoming a dentist or a lawyer.
One stormy night, with a fury of frustration building up inside of him, Javed grabs up all the pages of his poetry, rushes outside and dumps them in the trash. There – done. Words are a waste of time. Filling cavities – here I come!
Ah, but there’s those two cassettes of Bruce Springsteen’s music that his new buddy and Boss Bro, Roops (Aaron Phagura), has given him. Javed smacks “Darkness on the Edge of Town” into his Sony Walkman, slips on his headphones and, yes, proceeds to flip the f*ck out.
As he dances in the rain and imagines himself in his very own 80s music video, Javed can hardly believe it. An American, born in New Jersey, with a clenched fist for a voice, is singing to him and him only. This “Boss” sat down one day, conjured up the town of Luton in his mind, spotted a boy named Javed, watched him for a few days and then wrote “The Promised Land.” Amazing! Does this sound at all familiar? This is what the best songwriters do for us – they sing our songs not their own.
Giddy, freewheeling, at times, gloriously loopy and unabashedly jubilant, “Blinded By the Light” is a treat. Director Gurinder Chada (Bend It Like Beckham) and writers Paul Mayeda Berges and Sarfraz Manzoor – whose true life story inspired the film – lovingly tap into the soul of sixteen and all its dizzying emotional glory and ride it for 118 rollicking minutes.
One moment, Javed feels as if he’s been shot up through the clouds on some fast flight of euphoria. In the next moment, when the music stops, and the grim reality of his life in Luton barges its way back into his brain, he plunges, like some kind of broken bird, back down to the ground with a sickening thud.
Sometimes you love a movie before you see it. Or, more accurately, you love the idea of a movie before you see it. For me, that was the case here. I love Springsteen’s music, I love writing, I love movies and I am the son of an immigrant. Check, check, check and check.
Having said that, the filmmaking here is solid and playful and the story is fully fleshed out and not quite as simple as it first seems. Take the clash between Javed and his father. Yes, it is a very familiar one – it’s a clash between the ruler and the ruled, tradition versus modernity, old versus young. It’s a clash between a man trying to perpetuate an ancient way of being and a boy trying his best to escape it.
Yet, in a quiet and moving way, the filmmakers put Javed on a path to understanding that by rejecting his father he is rejecting a part of himself – turning his back on the people and the places he comes from. The Boss speaks to him, yes, but, the him he speaks to is Pakistani and Muslim. The him he speaks to has a family and a culture and a history whose volume cannot be so easily lowered to accommodate this new sound – no matter how thrilling it is.
Want to spot a real filmmaker? Look for moments where the images do all the heavy lifting. The actors don’t need to say a damn thing. Show don’t tell. I’ll never forget that wonderfully unsettling moment from “Rosemary’s Baby”, when director Roman Polanski uses a few puffs of cigar smoke to signal the most crucial moment in the whole movie. This is the moment from which all other moments flow. A few puffs of smoke! Brilliant.
While “Blinded By the Light” doesn’t feature anything quite as brilliant as that, there are two key scenes which, through simple, yet powerful images, show us how, in his newfound zest for everything Bruce, Javed has forgotten a few things Javed.
As payback to his sister Shaszia (Nikita Mehta) for not spilling the beans about his new white girlfriend, Javed agrees to accompany her to a secret party being held in the daytime. Forbidden to go out at night, the Muslim teens of Luton have no choice but to party during the day. So, they dress like they are going to school and then, when inside a specially chosen location, change into their party clothes and kill it on the dance floor. The music is Pakistani. The people are Pakistani. Yet, they are young, dancing and defying their parents.
At first, Javed slips on his headphones and dances to Springsteen while everyone else grooves to the sound of frenzied Pakistani music backed by pounding modern dance beats. But, then, something interesting happens.
Inspired by his sister, her friends and the entire packed place full of people just like him grooving to music that is very much a modern take on the music of his father’s old world, Javed removes his headphones. Rocking out to the old world tunes, an understanding begins to form in his mind. It’s vague, at first, but, in that very moment, he begins to make space in his new self for the culture he had been running away from ever since he first slapped that Springsteen cassette into his Sony Walkman and flipped the f*ck out.
In the next key scene, it’s his eldest sister’s wedding day, but Javed has his mind elsewhere. Springsteen is coming to the UK and tickets go on sale that very same day. So, he bolts for the record store to pick up a few.
Meanwhile, packed into their cars, his family heads to the community centre for the wedding ceremony. On the way, they almost literally run into the National Front – a fascist group of numbskulls then operating in the UK. They are marching their sorry asses through the neighbourhood in a bold show of strength. A confrontation ensues and Javed’s father gets punched in the face and falls to the ground.
Arriving too late to help, Javed watches from afar. He and his father exchange a long, knowing look.
Self and the necessary actions it requires to come alive and thrive smash head long into the collective and the duties Javed feels to father and family. While he was off having a ball in Springsteen land, his father was in the land of Luton getting his face rearranged by the fat fist of some far right doofus. The scene could hardly be more on point or emotionally impactful.
Earlier in the film, Springsteen’s music awakened a part of Javed that he was busy denying existed – one writer igniting the fire in another. Self-actualization. Heavy emphasis on SELF. But, here, in the midst of an attack on his father and family, the self dissolves and Javed feels, once again, his undeniable connection to his community.
In the days and weeks following the chaos of this moment, he, ironically, comes to see the wisdom in one of Springsteen’s most famous lines, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins”, and relates it, not to his desperate desire to embrace the new and transform himself into a writer, but, instead, relates it to his father, to his family and to his identity as a Pakistani Muslim.
The self embraces the collective. The smooth hand of the new world reaches out to shake the coarse and weathered hand of the old world. Afterall, when all is sung and done, we are much more than words on a page. We are the walking, talking sums of all that has come before and all that comes after. We are both old and new. The musician who originally inspired Javed to run away from his history is now gently taking him by the hand and walking him right back to it.
One more observation. We go to the movies for many reasons. We look up the choices on our phones, note the showtime and dutifully drive out to the theatre.
During that process, we think we are in control of what we will see. This is not true. Oh, in some sense, I guess we are. We choose the family drama instead of the horror film. So, we are choosing to be moved rather than to be scared. But, scared is an elastic word. Yes, we are scared of some demon clown emerging from the inky dark to do us harm, but we are also scared, in a different way, of being reminded of a fundamental emotional truth that, for most of our lives, we have managed to keep hidden somewhere equally dark – deep down inside of us.
It hit me quick – like that punch Javed’s father takes late in the film. A son wants a lot of things from his father. Some of those things are easily given and just as easily forgotten once they have been received – a big wheel, a bike, a video game system, a computer, a camcorder, a stereo system, the keys to the car. If I could take all of that crap and throw it into a huge garbage bag and drop it into the nearest body of water knowing that, if I did so, I would receive, instead, my father’s approval and admiration for my own artistic pursuits – I’d do it in an instant. You see what I mean about mistakenly believing that we choose the movies we see? We choose a title, a synopsis and a trailer – not a movie.
I lost my father about four and a half years ago. He was a wonderful man. There was real love between us. Our last words to each other, were, “I love you” and “I love you, too.” I hang on to that moment like some people hang on to the front bar of a roller coaster car as it gently eases them forward into a steep drop.
But, truth is, he would have rather seen me working construction than pursuing a writing career. I don’t blame him. He was an Italian immigrant – who came to Canada in the late 1950s – who knew the sweat and ache of physical labour from the time he was 6 and working on a farm.
In Canada, he worked his tail off and, as far as I know, never turned down an overtime shift. And there were plenty of them. He was even stopped once by the cops for speeding to his workplace – Scarborough Utilities – at two in the morning. “Where are headed so fast this late at night?” the cop asked. “Work”, my wonderful, beautiful father replied.
According to my parents, when I was born, the doctor handed all 10 pounds of me to my father, saying, “He’s ready for work.” Work – my father and I had two different ideas about what that word entailed. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. Some are a chip off the old block while some avoid picking up blocks altogether. Still, love has a way of building bridges out of words and hugs and kisses. For that I am grateful.
Similarly, though, Javed and his father, Malik, fight throughout “Blinded By the Light”, there is never any doubt of the love between the two.
Wanting to be your own man does not eliminate a son’s aching need to have his father pat him on the back for a job well done. Javed gets that pat while also becoming exactly the man he wanted to be. Good for him. Good for the audience. It was moving to see.
