BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
Director Gurinder Chadha
Cert. 12A 118 mins
The opening shot of Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light reminded me of Nathanael’s incredulous question to Philip in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’
It shows a simple road sign pointing travellers toward two disparate places: London and Luton. Under the word ‘Luton’ is a graffitied, five-letter predicate, letting passers-by know just how bad a place it is. You get the idea.
We’re left to wonder: ‘Can anything good come out of Luton?’
Well, Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra) is from there – and we quickly meet him. He’s a Brit with roots in Pakistan. The film is set in the 1980s, so he’s forced to straddle difficult tensions. The brunt of this tension centres on his relationship with his father, Malik Khan (Kulvinder Ghir).
Why don’t they get along? Javed thrives on music and individualistic expression; Malik subsists on silence and corporate responsibility.
Nothing in Javed’s life goes well: he’s a misfit in school (h e’s one of a few South Asian students), he’s listless in his creative outlets (writing depressing songs for his musician friend Matt), and he’s a victim of savage racism (at one point, he gets spat on).
And then he meets ‘The Boss’, Bruce Springsteen, the one whose music is, according to Javed’s other Pakistani friend, ‘the direct to all that is true in this [garbage] world.’ Springsteen’s music gets Javed; his music speaks to him – more than that, it describes him.
Javed’s affection for and obsession with ‘The Boss’ epitomises the chasm between him and his father. Everyday, Malik gives himself to General Motors. But he’s nothing more than capitalist grist for the mill, and so he’s laid off when the economic gears grind to a halt. He can’t find work, which only exacerbates his anger with his son who’s dressing up like an American rock star and giving himself to poetry and song-writing.
Blinded by the Light invokes an unavoidable comparison to another film from this year that’s also titled after a famous song, and also seemingly about one band’s effect on a man in crisis. That’s Danny Boyle’s Yesterday (reviewed in the September issue of en).
But the similarities are merely surface-level. In Yesterday, the so-called ‘problem’ is slight: Jack’s not famous. Here, the problems are real and systemic. Furthermore, though the premise for Yesterday is fantastical on its face, the film itself plays it fairly straight. Blinded by the Light, on the other hand, takes some aesthetic and formal liberties. Though it’s about more serious topics, and though it’s ‘based on a true story’, it doesn’t take itself too seriously (hence the song-and-dance bit at the flea market).
Yesterday is fine – funny yet forgettable. Blinded by the Light is the superior film in almost every respect. Jack uses The Beatles, but Javed loves ‘The Boss’.
And it’s that love for Bruce Springsteen that propels Javed to consider the hate he feels for his culture, his father, and his hometown. Chadha’s film provokes a thoughtful and honest consideration of how we grow to appreciate where we’re from, and how it affects who we are.
In other words, the film is Javed’s journey to answer the question: ‘Can anything good come out of Luton?’ The answer might surprise you, just as it surprised him.
