(2007, English and Bengali) "I too have secrets," admits Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjeel): "Now is the time for truth." Based on Monica Ali's novel of different kinds of love, director Sarah Gavron presents the affecting story of a homesick Bangladeshi woman's stifling marriage to a fat, pompous, tyrannical husband apart from her native land and family. Nevertheless, "like an oyster makes a pearl," she creates a precious pearl in her heart.

"We must not run from our fate," her mother taught her, emphasizing the importance of enduring, only then to commit suicide; her father arranged for her marriage at 17 to an older, educated Bangladeshi in London, while her younger sister Hasina remained in the village. Sixteen years later with two daughters (having lost her first-born son) - Shahana, the older a rebellious teenager - Nazneen, a simple girl from a village, is silently unhappy with Chanu (Satisha Kanshik), whose promises to return to Bangladesh remain unfulfilled; the letters from her sister are filled with romantic expectations (like a faerie princess in a story): "When will you ever come home?"

After Chanu is passed over for a promotion (his dream of becoming "a big man" dashed), losing his position at the firm, Nanzeen makes acquaintance with Razia, a neighbor, from whom she obtains a sewing machine and contract to stitch blue jeans; she harbors hopes of earning enough money for a visit to her sister. The young man who delivers and picks up the clothing, Karim (Christopher Simpson), urges her to attend political meetings for Muslims in opposition to extremists.

Meanwhile, Chanu purchases a computer (forbidding any of his family's touching it) on borrowed money from a usurious Muslim woman who comes to collect payments from Nazneen. Razia warns her: "You'll never get rid of the debt."

Telling Nazneen that he likes her because she has neither abandoned her roots for Western fashions and attitudes nor mindlessly turned to religion, Karim gradually draws her into his sphere of affection - falling in love, foolish she realizes, but unable to help it. With the attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, racial tensions and suspicions toward all Muslims increase in the UK; also Nanzeen learns of Hasina's calamity.

"You don't need things to be possible any more," says Chanu, taking a more realistic, though beleaguered, viewpoint: "You need things to be certain." Attending one of the political meetings with his wife, he speaks out, reminding the young, idealistic Muslims, who call for solidarity among their "brothers," of their own history in Pakistan where Muslim-on-Muslim warfare killed three million Islamists.

He books tickets for all four to fly to Bangladesh - "How?" Nazneen asks; "Where there's a will," he replies, "there's a way" - while Karim argues for her to get a divorce. "I cannot leave," she tells Chanu; "I cannot stay," he answers.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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