East is East

Irish writer-director Damien O’Donnell turns in an impressively unvarnished debut, adapting Ayub Khan-Din’s play about a working class Pakistani family in 1970s Manchester, England. Om Puri and Linda Bassett, as pater and mater, respectively, of a brood of six sons and one daughter, give honest performances that turn to shame most American actors’ portrayals of blue-collardom. Like fellow Brit Janet McTeer, whose performance as a Southern woman in Tumbleweeds earned an Oscar nomination, Bassett, and co-star Puri, creates a character, not a caricature. Here, the conflict is in how 25 years of marriage can’t disguise the couple’s fundamental difference regarding arranged marriages. O’Donnell finds plenty of humor in the situation but doesn’t detract from the dramatic emphasis when tensions between the couple turn ugly. Using the theme of assimilation but without bogging down the storyline, O’Donnell juggles the various actors who play the sons. Maybe Manchester, the landscape for working-class poets, from playwright Shelagh Delaney to Morrissey of The Smiths, is dark and gloomy, but it offers the right backdrop for O’Donnell’s refreshingly honest look at the struggle. The family doesn’t have indoor plumbing, and one scene plays off their alternative quite dryly. (R) Rating: 7