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Anita and Me |
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| 'Anita and Me', a tale of an alienated young
Asian growing up in Britain, will inevitably draw comparisons with other
east-meets-west comedy dramas such as 'East is East' and 'Bend it Like Beckham'
- but its portrayal of a young girl's first encounters with smalltown prejudice
is just as indebted to 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. There is even, in tribute
to that film, a Boo Radley figure: the mysterious 'Yeti' who emerges from
his gothic mansion only at night.
It is 1972. Meena, the 'Me' of the title, is a pre-adolescent girl living in Tollington, a Black Country microcosm of Little England, where the local shopkeeper (Lynne Redgrave) claims to 'know about the world' because she has been to Brighton and was 'the first in this village to taste a scallop'. Meena's extended Punjabi family wants her to be well educated and steeped in their traditions, but Meena just wants to listen to rock and roll, eat fish and chips, and aspires to being 'a blonde writer'. So when precocious blonde misfit and 'groovy chick' Anita moves in next door, Meena has a new best friend and role model. Only the visit of Meena's eccentric grandmother (Zohra Sehgal) from India, and a spate of racist incidents in Tollington, leads Meena to reassess who she is and who she wants to be. The script of 'Anita and Me' has been adapted by Meera Syal from her own novel, and it has all the witty observations on ethnicity that you might expect from one of the writers of 'Goodness Gracious Me'. Yet Syal, who also appears in the film as the monstrous Auntie, has seasoned the film's humour with moments of real sadness, and occasional wonder. Director Metin Huseyin manages to capture the spirit of '70s England without wallowing in a nostalgic whitewash, and the combination of Meena's wry narration and the film's vibrant colours conveys perfectly the perspective of a growing girl. The cast is excellent, with newcomers Chandeep Uppal (as Meena) and Anna Brewster (as Anita) meriting special attention. Like all good films about the past, 'Anita and Me' is also a film about the present. See it, and decide for yourself whether this nation has really grown up. Anton Bitel, 02.12.02 |
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