Mira Nair’s film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which opened the 69th Venice International Film Festival, is a refreshing contrast to the movies so far engendered by the war on terror in that the central protagonist is a Pakistani Muslim.
The director drops viewers right into the action in a gripping opening sequence that cuts between the kidnapping of a middle-aged American on the streets of Lahore at the end of an evening out and a sophisticated party of music elsewhere in the city, at which virtuoso performers delight an audience with ecstatic renderings of poetry in Urdu. How these events are linked becomes clear as a misty dawn rises over the domes and minarets of the Punjabi city.
The reluctant fundamentalist of the title — the film, which is showing out of competition, is based on Mohsin Hamid’s best-selling 2007 novel — is Changez Khan, a young Pakistani, played by the British actor Riz Ahmed, who is working as a university professor in Lahore, where his outspoken criticism of U.S. influence in Pakistan has won him a vociferous student following. The C.I.A. suspects he is involved with terrorists and they have him under surveillance.
Something more than a thriller, the film also is the personal story of one young man, Changez, whose ambitions and certainties have been radically undermined by global political events and whose character we see developing and shifting in the face of them.
Mr. Ahmed gives a powerful and nuanced performance as Changez. The supporting cast, including Kiefer Sutherland as Jim Cross, Changez’s monomaniacal boss in New York, and Om Puri, that craggy-featured master of damaged dignity, as Abu, his poet father in Lahore, are also commendable.Michael Andrews’s score, embracing traditional Pakistani songs, pop, funk and rap, is also a key element of the film. Sufi verses and music of the kind deplored and persecuted by fundamentalist fanatics provide a universal and humane spiritual leitmotif running through the story.
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