THERE’S a line somewhere near the end of Gurinder Chadha’s latest film, Blinded by the Light, where the lead character says: We only win, if we all win’ - or something very close to that.
Coming as it does in Javed’s (Viveik Kalra) powerful closing monologue (a school speech), it’s a throw-away line, almost - but it’s actually very revealing if you want to understand her motivations for making such a film in the first place.
For some years, Chadha had harboured the ambition to make a film from journalist Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir, Greetings from Bury Park (2007) - a tale of a young man who dreams of being a writer, faces family resistance and has to endure the unflinching racism of the times and finds the courage to confront all that, via the music of US rock legend, Bruce Springsteen. It’s really a classic underdog story.
Manzoor had revealed to journalists before its release that he had nursed an ambition for Chadha to make a movie from the book he was writing - they had bonded over Springsteen’s music some years earlier.
Manzoor had written many articles about his love of Springsteen and Chadha had contacted Manzoor and the feeling towards Springsteen’s music was very mutual, the filmmaker having been introduced to the music during a summer job at Harrods.
The book when it came out was well received and much acclaimed in the way that it showed how a working-class Pakistani origin Muslim lad could smash the templates set for him by society and his family. And it was Bruce that helped him on his way.
All this made for a good story but was some way off a script and a screenplay. Manzoor set to work but it wasn’t all there - until Brexit.
“All of a sudden there were those xenophobes that sort of came out of nowhere,” Chadha told Sonia Rao of the Washington Post. She returned to the script and saw huge parallels between the 1980s and today.
The die had been cast and the line about winning only if we all win could have come straight out of an anti-Brexit playbook, while understanding why some working-class communities continue to be seduced by the idea (if not its reality). Most feel like they have been losing for a long time and feel Brexit will inspire some sort of correction.
Away from the naked politics of the film so much as it has them - it is a celebration of Springsteen’s music and an ode to working-class Asian families everywhere.
When the film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year, Chadha, Manzoor and lead Kalra were all in attendance. The audience there loved it - and not just because it celebrated The Boss (Springsteen’s nickname) but many were genuinely moved by the tale of a young man battling on two major fronts and trying to keep his dreams alive and achieving them – one of them, by getting a girlfriend!
The story of how Chadha acquired Springsteen’s music has been much told on TV sofas on both sides of the Atlantic and a glitzy US premiere in Asbury Park, the home of Springsteen and with him and
his wife in attendance, ahead of its US wide release on August 14, added yet more lustre and stardust to what is a very British underdog tale.
At the time of going to press, it was too early to say whether Blinded would do as well Bend it like Beckham (2002). At Sundance, Chadha had wrapped a £12 million distribution deal and early indications are that Blinded by the Light will make money.
“I saw what The Big Sick had done (at Sundance) the year previously,’ she told a UK arts and culture magazine.
Praise has not been universal by any means (The Guardian thought it a bit cliched) - but Chadha takes criticism as a necessary part of her job. She told an audience at Chai with Chadha at the London Indian Film Festival in June that she accepted negative reviews.
“I started out as a journalist,” she told the audience. And many forget that her first job was working for BBC news and she first made 29-minute documentary, I am British but - it’s about the birth of British bhangra and the scene at the time in late 1980s.
As well the film this year, Chadha’s first series for TV, premiered on ITV in June.
Beecham’s House is a period drama set before the time of the British Raj, in Delhi, in 1795.
Chadha really had her work cut out last year, finishing filming Blinded by the Light and then going straight onto the making of Beecham House.
Shot both in Ealing Studios and Jaipur, the jury is divided. A second series had not been commissioned (at the time of going to press) but Chadha’s lavish sets and searing tale of romance, perfidy and Mughal court machinations deserve another airing.
In John Beecham (Tom Bateman) she had a brooding, Darcy-like (from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), upright moral force of a character trying to steer a course between the sheer unbridled avarice of the East India Company and the declining facade of Mughal power.
Chadha is known to have series outlines for 2 and 3 in a drawer and created the series with her husband, and well-established screen writer, Shah Ruk Husain.
At the same Chai with Chadha, Chadha told the audience that Beecham House had come out of her work and research on Viceroy’s House (2017).
The period drama covering Partition and the role of Lord Louis Mountbatten was something of a departure for Chadha but handling an all-star cast of Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson to name but two, showed how far she had come since her first feature, Bhaji on the Beach (1993).
The daughter of immigrants from East Africa who ran a shop in Southall wasn’t supposed to be making films and hobnobbing with likes of Bruce Springsteen or Aishwarya Rai (as she was in 2004 in Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice), but she was, and has been documented as Britain’s most prolific female filmmaker by the British Film Institute with more than seven features to her name as director - more than anyone at the time of the BFI survey about three years ago. Since then there has been Viceroy and Blinded.
Awarded an OBE in 2006, Chadha has twins - a boy and a girl.
A director with a populist touch, she doesn’t get the credit she sometimes merits - she feels monocultural and monolingual Brits don’t get her or her work sometimes - The Guardian review of Beecham House by Lucy Mangan was withering - Chadha has a point and it is an argument you may hear a lot more about in the future.
