Afzal-s2007

The Painted Veil is definitely of the Merchant Ivory school of filmmaking. Stuffy English Characters from an old English novel grappling with their Victorian/Edwardian constraints in regard to love and society, in an exotic setting. It looks great and the music is excellent. The actors are excellent. The plot unravels slowly and with great care and taste. Moreover, there is a very modern re-appreciation of colonialism, as of course the English can't get away with rampant imperial colonialism anymore.

So far all good standard Merchant/Ivory, and I do think The Painted Veil is a good film. But I think it's weighed down by its central moral about love and marriage. Naomi Watts is excellent and very believable as a racy woman bound by a stuffy husband. But this plot line drags with morality. I also think Edward Norton is a rare American actor, of the De Niro school, in that he is willing to go to the depths of his character without compromise. In this case stuffy, cold, moralistic, withheld. And its with Norton's Doctor, and his obsessive pursuit of science, that I think the film rises above good into great. The scenes where he tracing the cause and cure of the cholera epidemic are very special. This could have been a very fine, oddball film about a batty doctor in China, but it's bound down by a conventional story. Also the film should have had no flashbacks and started at the couple's arrival in China. That way, the tensions would have simmered away, leaving us guessing and slowly working out what happened to this mismatched couple. A braver filmmaker,probably European, could have made this a great film had he trusted his brilliant actors.

Tandoori Nights was created by Farrukh Dhondy for C4, who was also a top exec for the channel. For series 2 Meera Syal wrote the opening episode, and it's a cracker. In this episode you see a lot of things she would develop and that play to her strengths as a writer- creating a vibrant sense of place full of great comic characters- Asian West London (Goodness Gracious Me, Bride and Prejudice etc.)- but this episode shows a sinuousness and complexity that is missing from her crowd pleasing later work- not that this is unfunny- actually it's very funny.

The series is about Jimmy Sharma, played by the great Saeed Jaffrey, a Punjabi Indian restaurant owner who is being undone by his former Bangladeshi waiter and now rival restaurant owner, Rashid (played by that other excellent veteran actor, Baddi Uzzaman).

In this episode, Jimmy is at his nadir and wit's end- The Far Pavillions (the rival restaurant) is puling in the punters with its cheap and cheerful, 'chips with everything' approach. Jimmy, in the vein of great comic characters, sees himself as a superior restaurateur, but with little business, he resorts to an old friend's advice to go on the PR slog and set himself up rather like an Indian Bernard Matthews- which he feels is a debasement.

Meanwhile, his equally stubborn daughters are both playing havoc- one, played by Rita Wolf, is trying to make a documentary for her degree on the Asian Community, while the other, Bubbly (played by Shelley King) is trying her best to lead the community through running a youth centre which is trying to put on a special Community evening- both are diverting resources and attention away from Jimmy'crumbling business, which leads to a head when Jimmy's oddball Bangladeshi chef, Alaudin, is invited to perform for a Community night.

Syal's script cleverly plays with the clichés of Indianness- community and the compromises of migration to a post-colonial West. These are all themes in Syal's (and most other British Asian writer's) work- but is explored so smartly and entertainingly in this episode, in a manner you find with the best British Sit-Coms- like Fawlty Towers and Keeping Up Appearances.