Ae Fond Kiss

Review by Peter Bradshaw
Guardian, Friday September 17, 2004

An unfashionable streak of optimism and humanism runs through Ken Loach's new movie, scripted by Paul Laverty: an appealing Romeo-and-Juliet tale with lovely, unaffected performances about a second-generation Pakistani man who falls in love with the young Irish Catholic woman who teaches music at his sister's school. Loach's 1984 documentary about the miners' strike asked: whose side are you on? That question is here made very difficult by the Balkanisation of culture and politics - and by the mysteries of the human heart.

Casim (Atta Yaqub) is a DJ in Glasgow who dreams of owning his own club, but for his family's benefit acts the role of dutiful son with an accountancy degree, blandly accepting the marriage that his Muslim parents are arranging for him. Roisin (Eva Birthistle) has a more or less amicable separation from her husband and lives alone, teaching at the state Roman Catholic secondary, which we see explode into out-and-out disorder when Casim's feisty younger sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) announces at her debating club that she rejects western labels and calls herself Glaswegian, Pakistani - and also a Rangers supporter. Short of actually donning a bowler and singing The Sash, Tahara could do nothing more incendiary. A virtual riot kicks off outside the school gates; Casim intervenes to help, locks eyes with the beautiful Roisin and winds up moving in with her.

The love affair of a south Asian man and a white woman is only the second most dangerous interracial love story. Reversing the sexual roles would raise the stakes, even potentially bringing us into the world of the "honour killing", the murder of errant young women by their outraged families - of which there has been at last one suspected case a year in the UK for the past decade. It would make for a very different kind of film, and it might also be more difficult to find a south Asian actress, professional or non-professional, prepared to do the reasonably explicit bedroom scenes that Birthistle has here with Yaqub.

Ae Fond Kiss is, nonetheless, a reminder that racial and cultural difference in Britain, so far from dying out with the older generations, is in some communities stronger and fiercer than ever. Casim gets an easier ride from his parents than a wayward daughter, but his affair scandalises his extended family, and the stigma causes his elder sister's arranged marriage to be cancelled. Casim angers and hurts Roisin very deeply by refusing to condemn his father Tariq (Ahmad Riaz), even when the old man exhibits every conceivable strain of chauvinism and bigotry in refusing to meet her.

For years, Casim has witnessed his father suffering racist abuse and assault, and in his heart believes that reactionary patriarchal values inherited from the old country are his community's castle-keep for survival. As for Roisin, she has no adherence to the Catholic faith other than a professional one, and apparently no family; it is rather her secular realism in the matter of relationships that provides the ideological confrontation. When Rukhsana (Ghizala Avan) demands to know if Roisin will love her brother Casim for ever, she can only answer honestly that she doesn't know.

Both the lovers have compelling father figures that come close to stealing the film. Semi-professional performer Ahmad Riaz makes Tariq a thoroughly believable dad: grumpily setting up car jump leads to shock dogs who pee on his storefront - the film's one moment of deadpan black comedy - but heartbreakingly devoted to his boy, and obsessed with building a house extension where Casim will live with his approved Pakistani bride. He memorably splutters with rage and pain when Tahara says she's leaving home to study journalism in Edinburgh. I don't see that scene getting shown as a clip at a black-tie award ceremony any time soon; there are no thespian fireworks or soundtrack histrionics. Yet in its understated, unshowy way it is outstanding, like a glimpse of real life - the sort of non-GM acting that only Loach can conjure up.

The same goes for the barnstorming confrontation between Roisin and her glowering, cigarette-smoking parish priest, terrifically played by non-professional Fr Gerard Kelly, who refuses to sign her employment certificate on the grounds that she is not a clean-living Catholic girl and treats her like a grumpy dad with a teenage daughter.

As for Casim and Roisin themselves, their relationship has no overtly passionate declarations of love, which may disappoint those who want a conventionally dramatic and romantic story. But it looks like the meeting of real people, and the sex scenes Loach contrives for them combine candour and delicacy. The political dimension to their love is more elusive; their homelands both experienced Britain's divide-and-quit tactic of imperial retreat, but the British ruling classes aren't the enemy. Casim's family have suffered from racism, yet it is they who discriminate against Roisin - and her own church, long subject to English bullying, is hard-hearted and authoritarian towards her as well. Yet Roisin, too, is obtuse and even callous in her initial failure to appreciate what Casim's family means to him.

So the battle lines are blurred in this 21st-century post-political world, and love doesn't solve anything. Laverty's title is taken from Burns, a melancholy lyric of farewell, and this movie must also take its leave from yesterday's political certainties. Loach's movie ends inconclusively, but it's still an attractive and big-hearted tribute to the heroism and loneliness of love.

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