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    CHAPTER TWELVE

    I m British b u t . . . :Empire and After

    T he empire film constitutes one of the most distinctive British genres.Stories of British colonial endeavors were, however, themselves col-onized by Hollywood in the 1930s in films like The Charge of theLight Brigade(Michael Curtiz, 1936) andG unga Din(George Stevens, 1939),wh ich exploited the opportunities for action and spectacle in exotic imperialsettings (India in both these cases) and drew on the acting talents of Holly-wood's Britishcolony.Alexander Korda struck back w ith a series of lavish em-pire films, whose extensive location shooting was made possible by the co-operation of imperial authorities.Themost successful of these w ere directedby his bro ther Zoltan, includingSanders of the River(1935), about the civ-ilizing influence of a colonial administrator in Africa, and a trilogy of filmsset inIndia:Elephant Boy(1937,codirected by Robert F laherty), he Drum(1938),and The Four Feathers(1939)1

    The last two films were filmed in Technicolor to make the most of theexotic settings, while their stories of bravery and sacrifice stressed the scopeand beneficence of British imperial rule. It was already becom ing clear thatthe empire's days were num bered and, after World WarII,the dismantling ofthe British Empire -asformer colonies became indepen dent states - w as oneof the most visible signs that the nation was no longer a major world pow-er. In the 1960s Hollywood studios invested in several British-made post-imperial epics, includingLaw rence of rabia (David Lean,1962),Zulu (CyEndfield, 1963), andKhartoum (Basil Dearden, 1966), set in the pas t but ex-pressing a sense of the impending end of Empire or a more complex andambivalent attitude towards it (Figure 74).2

    The loss of the empire was a theme frequently harped on by right-wingpoliticians in the postw ar years and linked to the domestic changes broughtabout by the socialist welfarestate. tthe sametime,many imm igrants fromthe former colonies came to Britain to mee t a demand for workers in mainlylow-payingjobs.For the m ost part, these newcomers had little choice but tosettle in already economically depressed areas in the larger cities, and theywe re often blamed for an increase in poverty and crime in theseareas.Therewere recurring race riots, like those in the London borough of Notting Hill

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    in1958,and British culture had to deal with the consequences of what hap-pens when 'out there' becomes 'over here.' ?While the empire films of the 1960s may reflect a nostalgia for the days

    whe n Britain was a world power, they also suggest that the roots of contem-porary prob lems lay in the past m isuse of colonial power. ssuch they needto be read alongside social problem films likeSapphire (Basil Dearden,1959),in which London police uncover racial tensions as they investigate themurder of the title character, a woman of mixedrace wh o passed as white.W hen the inspector discovers that the victim was colored, he learns imme-diately afterward that she was pregnant. The film thus explicitly raises theissue of miscegenation that was a central, but usually unavowed, co ncern forthe colonial ideology in the em pirefilms Since the police already know thatSapphire wore a red taffeta petticoat under her tweed skirt, the questions of color and passing becom e entangled in what amounts to an investigationof her sexual as well as racial identity.

    Made a year after the Notting Hill riots and at the beginning of the Brit-ish New Wave movement, the film sought to emphasize its topicality by itsuse of authentic locations and contem porary music.4Sapphire was a stu-den t at the Royal Academy of Music, but the film's score is played by JohnDankw orth's modern jazz band (soon to be heard playing Dankw orth's ow nscore in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , and the students meet in acoffee bar wh ere they listen to traditional jazz (also featured in the openingof Look Back in Anger .

    sequence set in a nightclub seems to subvert the film's antiracist inten-tions when the black ow ner claims that he can tell the lilywhites becausetheir feet start tapping w he n they hear bongo drums, and his view seems tobe confirmed by rapidly edited shots of a woman dancing. Since the mur-derer tu rns o ut to be the racially prejudiced and sexually frustrated sister ofSapphire's wh ite boyfriend, it is easy to argue that th efilm sidesteps any seri-ous confrontation with the question of racism by locating it in individualswho are often already pathologized. 5

    Yet, after her body is dumped in a park in the opening sequence, Sap-phire appears in the film only in a black-and-white photograph in wh ich sheis dancing ecstatically and, asLola Youngsuggests, the film plays on the con-trast betw een her presen t deadness and the descrip tions of her vivacious-ness. 6 By bringing together contemporary discourses on race and sexuali-ty,Sapphiremay open itself up to regressive readings, but it does not closeoff the question of why suchavibrant young woman felt it necessary to con-ceal her racial background and why her sexual independence led to herdeath. It at least anticipa tes laterfilmshat will explore the relations b etw eenracial and sexual identities in ways that m any critics have seen as more pro-gressive.

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    I m British b u t . . . : Empire ndAfter 221

    Figure 74. Khartoum General Gordon (Charlton Heston) seeks peacein the Sudanand offerstherebellious Mahdi (Laurence O livier) present from China.WE RE LONDONERS YOU SEE:

    S MMY ND ROSIEGETL IDThe tensions and anxieties that flared up in the race riots were, at least part-ly, the result of living conditions in the innercities,but they were also foment-ed by discourses that stressedtheneedtomaintainthepurityofracial andnational identities. sitturned out, the immigrants from the former colonieswereanearly instanceofthe large-scale shiftsinpopulations through exileor migration, caused by rapid politicaland technological changes that soonbecame a global phenom enon and eventually turned Britain, like many othernations, into a multicultural society. sStuart Hall has recently stated, mostdefinitions of'Britishness' assume thattheperson who belongsis'white,'but the transformationofBritish society has encouragedamore hybrid con-ceptofnational identity andthedevelopmentofnew cultural forms.7

    One signofthese changes em ergedinNotting Hill, where residentsattempted to overcome the prejudice that led to the riotsof1958 by establish-ingalocal carnival that offered amarked contrastto thedrab conformismof Britain duringthe1950s andsoon becam e the largest stree t festivalinEurope. 8This trend has been widely contested, not least by the insular nation-alism associated w ith Margaret Thatcher's yearsofrule,and racist viewsarestillto befoundinBritish culture and British cinema.On theother hand,ithas become increasingly difficult tosustainthenotionofcultural purityinthe context of the ne w global economy. According to Jan Nederveen Pieterse,globalization can be seen as a process of hybridization which gives riseto aglobal melange so that the key question becom es thet rmsof mixture, theconditionsofmixingandmelange. ?1

    Manypeople now live outside their home coun tries, but these changeshave also resulted in newdefinitions of home, inwhich globalandlocalinfluences interact. Hanif Kureishi, who was born inLondonto anEnglishmother and Pakistani father, describestheappealofthe ideaof'home' to

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    F igure 75 W e' re Londone rs you see : Sammy (Ayub Khan-Din) and Rosie(Frances Ba rber) enjoy a w alk beside the Tham es in Sammy and osie etLaid

    Pakistanis and Indians born and brought u p here w ho consider their positionto be the result of a diaspora and are awaiting return to a be tterplace,wherethey belong, wh ere they are welcome. 10In Kureishi's short stories, novels,plays,filmand television screenplays, and in the one film he has directed, heexplores the need to develop a ne w sense of home in the spirit of StuartHall's insistence tha t modern nations are all cultural hybrids. 11

    Kenneth Kaleta argues that Kureishi's nationalism is neither Asian no rBritish, neither colonized nor assimilated; rather, it has assumed the globalidentity of post-W orld WarII,twen tieth-century urbanism 12The key to un-derstanding this global identity is through the function of London in muchof Kureishi's work. Kaleta quotes Kureishi on his love and fascination for in-ner London and claims that London is an apt metaphor for the new nationalidentity tha t Kureishi defines. ^This metaphor is central to Kureishi's screenplay forSammy and Rosie

    et Laid(Stephen Frears,1987),in which Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) returns to Lon-don, wh ere he lived as a youth, after retiring from a highly dubious politicalcareer in Pakistan. He is immediately confronted by riots in the s treets pro-voked by the police shooting ofablackwoman.Whereas he remem bers Lon-don as the cen ter of civilization, he now finds the city a cesspit and urgeshis son to come home. Sammy (Ayub Khan-Din) replies that London is hishom e and launches into an accoun t of the pleasures of life in the city. He in-sists tha t he and Rosie (Frances Barber), his white British lover, love our cityand we belong toit. It provides the basis for a new sense of identity that dis-places their national and racial differences: Neither of us are English, we'reLondoners you see (Figure 75).

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    Figure 76. What's left for you in this countrynow? : ohnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) meets the family of Omar (Gordon Warnecke) inMy eautifulLaundrette

    Sammy's rapturous list of urban delights gains much of its impact fromthe contrast with the urbane ideal found in the contemporary heritage films(see Chapter 11). In the discourse of heritage, as David Morley describes it, the countryside . . . is still largely represented as the essence of white English-ness - as a stable, culturally hom ogeneous, historically unchanging territoryin wh ich racial difference can only be seen as an uncomfortable and desta-bilising presence. 14InHowardsEnd for example, Ruth Wilcox's love of th ecoun try house in wh ich she was born illustrates the need for belonging thatKureishi refers to in speaking of the old sense of home. When she (mistak-enly) declares that her son takes after her because he truly loves England,she makes an exception of London, wh ich they find unstable and imper-manent because buildings are being pulled down all the time.It sprecisely its instability thatSammy,like Kureishi, celebrates in his odeto London. In an essay on London Films, Charlotte Brunsdon argues that,as depicted in contemporary British cinema, London is a contradictory andpluralplace:deeply territorialized and local while also offering brief momentsof Utopian multiculturalism, most notably in Kureishi'sfilms. 5Kureishi him-self refers to the fluidities and possibilities that he finds the re, and it is thisquality that he and Frears sought to capture in the style of the film. 16In thediary Kureishi kept during the production, he described it as afilmof juxta-positions and contrasts, of different scenes banging hard together, and heeven hoped that it would not be too diffuse. 17Many critics did indeed feel that the film dealt with too many topics andhad too many characters, unlike his earlier collaboration with Stephen Frears,My eautiful Laundrette(1985),which seemed rather more optimistic aboutthe Utopian possibilities of the new multicultural nation (Figure 76). Thecritics were even harder onLondon Kills Me(1991), Kureishi's first, and so

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    4 British Film

    far last, directorial effort, but all these films depict characters whose socialsituations, political beliefs, and sexual needs interact and often contradicteach other. Kureishi refuses to idealize the victims of racism and intoleranceand often depicts racist attitudes within the diasporic communities them-selves.Theeffect is to unsettle the specta tor through the collision of Utopianand dystopian perspectives, using irony as a way of com menting on bleak-ness and cruelty without falling into dourness and didacticism. 18

    The montage sequence in which Sammy describes his love for Londonis a good example of this technique. Sukhdev Sandhu points out that it is didactic and provocative rather than merely descriptive in its challenge toboth isolationist and assimilationist approaches to the diasporic experience.19However, the overall effect dep ends on the coupling of a celebration of di-versity with an ironic dep iction of the superficial pursu it of the latest trends,including a seminar in semiotics in which an audience member asks thetheorist Colin MacCabe to define the relation between a bag of crisps andthe self-enclosed unity of the linguistic sign.

    The structure of the whole film depends on this tension between itsdidactic purp ose and its ironic disavowal of political correctness. It reachesits Utopian climax with a split-screen image of three unlikely couples makinglove - Sammy with Anna (Wendy Gazelle), a visiting American photographer,in her studio; Rosie with Danny (Roland Gift), a black youth, in his caravanon a patch of wasteland beneath a highway; and Ran with Alice (ClaireBloom),awhite wom an he kn ew in the past, in her suburbanhome.Thismo-ment of shared passion is temporary, and the film's othe r climactic sequenceis the eviction of the squatters from the wasteland that has been purchasedby developers. In keeping with Kureishi's ironic strategies, Frears edits theimages of the caravans leaving the site to the accompaniment of the hymn IVow to Thee yCountry, recorded from a Conservative election broadcast.Samm y and R osie Get Laidwas made at the time of Thatcher's thirdelectoral victory, which, according to Kureishi at the time, marked the deathof the dream of the sixties, wh ich was that our society would becom e moreadjusted to the needs ofallthe peo ple who live in it. He felt that the angerand despair following the Election gave the film a hard political edge thatmade it less popular thanMy Beautiful Laundrette 20In another of Frears'sadditions to the screenplay, the ilmopens with a shot of urban w aste accom-panied by the voice of Thatcher speaking of the urgent need to clean up the innercities. Her way of doing this is to pu t the needs of developers beforethose of the peop le, and Kureishi presents a much m ore ambivalent view ofthe messy realities of people'slives.The film ends w ith Sammy and Rosie si-lently embracing each o ther after Rafi's suicide, their complicated relationshipoffering a glimmer of hope that still retains some of the force of the film'searlier Utopian moments.

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    YOU TRY FUSION AND YOU GET CONFUSION:BH JION TH BE CHA ND E STIS E ST

    The darkly ironic tonein thefilmsofFrearsandKureishi challenged whatSarita Malik calls the unremitting politicizationofdiscourse when readinga Black film [that] producedafocuson'positive' and 'negative' images. AsMalik suggests, this approach also encouragedtheproductionoffilms,ikeYoung Soul Rebels(Isaac Julien, 1991), ild est(David A ttwood,1992),andBhajio the Beach(Gurinder Chadha, 1993), that refuse a simple focus onracial politicsandacknowledge other facets ofidentity, shifting thefocusfrom the 'politics ofrace'to the 'politics of the dance-floor,' the former inex-tricably linked to the latter. 21These tactics made thefilmsmore complicatedas ideological texts,butthey made them more accessible,notonlytoaudi-ences from thecultures that they depicted butalso- atleast potentially -to mainstream audiences gradually becoming m ore recep tive to diasporic vi-sionsofcultural and national identity.

    During this period,one of the major developmentsin thepoliticsof race inBritain wastheemergenceofacoalition around the ideaof blackculture, incorpora ting the shared exp erience of racism by Britons from Afri-can, Asian,andCaribbean backgrounds. There were,ofcourse, differencesamong these groups, one of wh ich, as explained by Cary Raginder Sawhney,is that, thanks largely to the influence of popularmusic,Afro-Caribbean influ-ences have becom e part of British popular culture and can be seen as inex-tricably linked with cultural no tions of modernity, while Asian cultures havecharacteristically been seen as backward, fixed in a colonial past. 22Yet,as faras British cinema is concerned , it isfilmsdealing with siancommunities thathave been most successful incrossing over intothemainstream, especiallywithBhaji o the Beach andEast Is East (Damien O'Donnell, 1999).Gurinder Chadha, who was born inKenyatoPunjabi parentsand haslivedinBritainformostofher life, insists thatBhajio the Beach her firstfeaturefilm,s a very Englishfilm but also that its style depends on the pullbetweenavery British film and being quite Indian on the other. She adds thatthis pull is present in every single scene, every single character, every singleframeofthe film. 2'Itdeals w ithagroupofBritish-Indian wo men who takea day trip from Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, to the working-classseaside resortofBlackpool. The older women,or aunties, still have the irroots in traditional Indian culture, while the two teenagers , Ladhu (Nisha Na-yar)andMadhu (Renu Kochar),arethoroughly assimilatedandspeak withbroad Birmingham accents.Inbetween aretwo young women with prob-lems:Ginder (KimVithana),wh o travels with her son and has separated fromher abusive husband, and Hashida (Sarita Khajuria), who has just discoveredthat sheispregnantbyOliver (Mo Sesay), he r British-Caribbean boyfriend.

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    The film's seriocomic to ne and the tension be tween realism and allegoryresemble Sammy and Rosie GetLaid Birmingham is a site of constraintand Blackpool one of excess, and the tensions that have developed in theformer are worked out in the latter in a way that exposes both the racismof British society and the aunties' illusions of an authentic Indian culture.When the group assembles for the trip, their leader, Simi (Shaheen Khan),delivers a speech in wh ich she refers to the twinyoke of sexism and racismthat they must bear in patriarchal society, but all the wom en appear dis-mayed by her theoretical jargon. They quickly cheer up w hen she urges themto have a female fun time, and the minibus leaves to the sounds of a live-ly Punjabi version of Summer Holiday, the title song from a 1963 film star-ring CliffRichard,an icon of white British popular culture (born in Lucknow,India).

    Simi's speech sets the tone of the filmas a tension be tween a recognitionof the serious problem s that the wo men face and the desire for fun to makelife bearable for them - and to attract an audience for the film.The conjunc-tion of racism and sexism is confirmed when the wom en attract the attentionofagang of lagerlouts at a highway rest area. When Simi tries to leave, oneof the gang asks if she is a lesbian, and she re torts, Are you the alternative?However, racism and sexism also exist with in the Indian community: Ginderrejects the subordinate role of women in the traditional Indian family (andher mother-in-law links her attitude to he r dark skin); Hashida has no t daredto tell her parents about h er boyfriend. Racism and sexism are also very muchpart of the commercial pleasures of the Blackpool tourist industry, but thefilm suggests that even stereotypes can becom e a source of fun providedthat people are willing to listen to each other.

    The appropriation of the Cliff Richard song signals the film scommitmentto cultural hybridity. Chadha argues that haji on the eachaddresses thesort of cross-referenced identities we all share, and she includes theCarryOncom edies, with their very con structed sense of Englishness, among theinfluences on her work, along with the colorful musicals of popular Indiancinema.24 sAnne Ciecko suggests, the film borrow s, but it also hybridizes,inverts, and destabilizes in a spirit that draw s on traditions of the carnival-esque (see Chap ter 8).25 In the context of recent developments in Britishsociety, the idea of carnival must evoke Caribbean culture, but it also appliesto th e gaudy pleasures of Blackpool and Bollywood.

    The cultural interactions that carnival encourages are highly ambiguous.In a sequence set in the college where Hashida met Oliver, Chadha relatesthis theme to the coalition around the idea of black British culture. Oliver'sfriend tries to dissuade him from following Hashida to Blackpool and, whileChinese students eat breakfast in the background, declares with exasperation, you try fusion and you get confusion. In a sense, the film is on the side of

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    Figure 77. Asha (Lalita Ahmed) nd Ambrose (Peter Cellier) enjoy thepleasures of Blackpool s Golden Mile in haji on the Beach

    confusion, recognizing the appeal of secure cultural identities but also insist-ing that these are illusory.The implications of the film svision for the national culture em erge mostclearly in the brief encou nter betw een Asha (LalitaAhmed),one of the "aun-ties,"and Ambrose (PeterCellier),a charming old actor, wh om she meets onthe beach (Figure77). shasuffers from headaches that bring onvisions,suchas the one that opens th e film in which she is harangued by a god and sur-rounded by gigantic versions of the products she sells in the familystore.Am-brose, w ho refers to Blackpool as "this fallen wom an that I call home," onceappeared in Indian roles in empire films but is now hoping for the role of

    Widow Twanky in the Christmas pantomime. He takes Asha to the theater,wh ich he associates with "our popular culture," and tells her that he admiresher because she has "hung on" to her traditions. However, her headaches de-rive from the pressures involved in hanging on to traditions that require herto sacrifice herself for the sake of her family.Chadha uses the parallels betw een the situations of Asha and Ambrose tosuggest a similar dynamic underlying cultural differences. When Rekha (SouadFaress), an Indian visitor who accompanies the group, first sees the Golden

    Mile,a stretch of outdoor attractions in Blackpool, she stops in astonishmentand cries out, "Bombay " She later tells the "aunties" that their view of Indiais hopelessly out-of-date, and th e film draws attention to an em ergen t globalpopularculture. In someways,its vision is close to th e "mass culture" critique,especially with regard to the influence ofU.S.popular culture inBritain:Thetwo boys who spend the day with Ladhu and Mahdu work at a hot-dog standand wear cowboy outfits, and the wom en m eet up in the evening at the Man-

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    hattanBar,where male strippers wear (and take off) U.S.Navy uniforms. Onthe other hand, the film stresses the differences within popular culture andits Utopian potential (see Chapter 5). It ends when the spectacular illumina-tions are turned on, as the minibus passes along the Golden Mile past the re-united Hashida and Oliver, while the older women now understand Ginder'ssituation, having witnessed the violence of her husband, who pursued herto Blackpool.

    If the female fun time inBhaji on the Beachis eventually achieved, itis despite the social constraints, and the internalized guilt, from which thewo men suffer. The tone ofEast IsEast which proved to be even more pop-ular, involves a similar seriocomic tension; but it proves to b e both more far-cical and less optimistic. Adapted from his own play by Ayub Khan-Din (whoplayed Sammy inSammy and Rosie Get Laid , the film is set in Salford, aworking-class district of Manchester, in1971.It deals with a mixed-race fam-ily, consisting of George Khan (Om Puri), his white wife Ella (Linda Bassett),and their seven children. George ow ns fish-and-chip shop but wants to bringup his children as traditional Muslims. The comedy stems largely from theirefforts to outw it him, but their opposition brings out the latent violence be-hind h is patriarchal authority.

    The period setting is important in that it makes possible a fairly conven-tional generational conflict in which the children rebel against the father'straditions. This plot had already been turned on its head two years earlier inMy Son the Fanatic(Udayan Prasad,1997),based on a screenplay by Kureishi,in which a taxi driver (also played by Om Puri),who has adapted comfortablyto his new life in a no rthern city, is shocked to find that his son w ants to goback to the old ways. In the entrepreneurial culture of the 1990s, the overtracism of 1970s Britain has receded, but the son tells his father that some ofus want something else besides muddle and that he is seeking belief,purity,belonging to the past.

    like the so-called heritagefilms,East Is Eastlooksback to a simpler timewhen cultural politics were m ore clearly denned. Yet itisMy Son the Fanaticthat begins with a song celebrating the green and pleasant land, accompa-nied by shots of country house and cows beside ariver.Whereas the earlierfilm established ironic parallels be tween British and Muslimnostalgia,East IsEast draws on the vocabulary of northern realism. 26It opens with establish-ing shots of terraced houses that evoke th e long-running television seriesCor-onation Street,also set in Manchester, which, until recently, had not reallyacknowledged the large immigrant population in the industrial north. Theseries also did not draw attention to the politics of racism, as the film doesin its newsreel footage of Enoch Powell advocating repatriation as a solutionto the race problem and its depiction of one of the Khans' neighbors w hoshares Powell's views (Figure 78 ).

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    Figure 78. ast Is EastGeorge (Om Puri) standsinfrontofpostersforEnoch Powell whilehisneighbor triesto g t signaturesfora pe titionon repatriation.Despite its engagement with white racism and the equally fanatical atti-tudes of the domestic tyrant, thefilmcould still be described as a funny, feel-good film [that] looksset to do forrace relations what The Full Montydidfor unem ployment. 27Its humor owes even moretotheCarry Ontradition

    than hajionthe each and often dependsonpushing stereotypestoex-cess.When George arrangesamarriageforhis eldest son,heruns awayinthe middle of the ceremony and turns up later as a gay hairdresser; two othe rsons find their prospective brides physically repulsive; and a formal meetingwith the patronizing familyofthese marriage prospec tsisdisrupted bythearrivalofyet another son,an artstudent, with his latest creation,alife-sizereplicaoffemale sexual organs.AccordingtoMalik,the farcical elementsdonot prevent thefilm from

    working as an interrogation into identity, belonging and Britishness, but shestresses that it hinges on the slippery line between laughing tand laughingwith British-Pakistanis. 28There are some quite uncomfortable mo ments,asintheinvitationtolaughat the ugliness ofthe b rides George has chosenfor his sons, andtheinclusionofa sequenceinwhichhebrutally beatshiswife for taking the children's side.Itis her patience and dignity that give thefilm its moral center, anditends not with th e Utopian reconciliationof hajion the eachbutwith thecouple quietly sittingin thefish and chipshopdrinking tea.

    COMEDIES OF CHAOS AND CHANCENOTTING HILL AN DBE UTIFUL PEOPLE

    Andrew Higson has recently argued that films likeMy eautiful Laundretteand haji on the eachcall into question the national cinema approachto

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    contem porary cinema, and he suggests that they should rather be discussedin the co ntext of a new post-national cinema that resists the tendency tonationalise questions of community, culture and identity and embraces mul-ticulturalism, difference and hybridity. 29On the other hand, John Hill insiststhat we need not assume the demise of a British national cinema just be-cause it no longer reflects a unified national identity or culture ; instead weshould see this in terms ofagrow th of films prepared to engage with a morediverse and complex sense of national, regional, ethnic, social, and sexualidentities within the U.K. 3o

    Clearly, the idea of national identity is changing, partly because of themulticultural influences brought about by postwar immigration but also be-cause of pressures caused by the postmodern global media environment.Mike Featherstone links the unwillingness of migrants to passively inculca tethe dominant cultural mythology of the nation or locality to a more generalsense of the fragmentation ofidentity, and he th en suggests that this is whycharacters inilmsikeMy eautiful Laundrette do not present positive uni-fied identity images and are consequen tly not easy to identify with. ?1Aswehave seen, this is not an entirely new developm ent in British cinema, but PaulGilroy argues that, in the con temporary cultural context, the co ncept of dias-pora . offers new possibilities for understanding identity, not as somethinginevitably determined by place or nationality, and for visualizing a futurewhe re new bases for social solidarity are offered and joined, perhaps via thenew technologies. '2

    In terms of the future of British cinema, the central tension would seemto be between the desire to find new forms of national identity along the linesof Tony Blair's vision of cool Britannia and a sense that Britain has been ab-sorbed into a multinational global culture. On the one hand, as Claire Monkpoin ts out, the notion ofanew British identity - with its emphasis on youth,modernity, style, and urban energy - served to signal New Labour's repu-diation of the 'heritage' version of national identity officially promoted byThatcherite Conservatism in the 1980s. 33On the other, this new identity hasto function in a a world in wh ich everyone's identity has been throw n intoquestion, and in wh ich, according to Kobena Mercer, the mixing and fusionof disparate elements to create new, hybridized identities point to ways ofsurviving, and thriving, in conditions of crisis and transition. 34Two British com edies from 1999 illustrate some of the issues involvedin the new situation.Notting Hill(Roger Michell) was the much anticipatedfollow-up toFour Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994), with thesame writer (RichardCurtis),produ cer (Duncan Kenworthy), and star (HughGrant),and produ cedbyWorking Title (one of Britain's m ost successful filmcompanies in recent years) through the international conglomerate PolyGramFilmed Entertainment. eautiful eople(Jasmin Dizdar) was produced by an

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    enterprising new company,TallStories, with the support of the British FilmInstitute and Channel Four, with additional funding coming from the ArtsCouncil of England (using the proceeds of the National Lottery), the Mersey-side Film Production Fund,BskyB,and British Screen. Its director becam e aBritish citizen in 1993, after leaving his native Bosnia before the collapse offormer Yugoslavia and graduating from film school in Prague.Economically,Notting Hillis clearly a product of the new global econ-omy whose commercial success depends on its ability to appeal to audi-ences beyond the dom estic market. It addresses the issue of national identitythrough the conflict be tween the Englishness of William Thacker (Grant),who owns a travel book shop but lives quietly in Notting Hill, which he calls a little village within the city, and th e glamorous jet-set lifestyle of the Amer-ican film star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts). Their romance draws on the Britishfascination w ith Hollywood and theU.S.attraction to old English charm , andthefilmexploits the contrast between itsstars'personas. It begins with a mon-tage of images of Anna, making public appearances that could easily be stockfootage of Roberts, and then introduces William, whose awkward modestyplays on an awareness that Grant's public image and charm are inextricablytied to his unreliability. '5

    Like most medium-budget British films,Beautiful eoplewas producedby piecing togethe r funding from a num ber of sources. In this case, the bud-get was raised entirely from British sources, but it is culturally a more globalfilm thanNottingHill It develops several intertwining plot lines that confrontcharacters from Britain and from formerYugoslavia.Andrew Horton claimsthat the film rides a surprisingly successful line betw een Bosnian chaos andBritish order, bu t it also makes clear that Britain is no t as ordered as the ster-eotype suggests.'6In one of the plot lines, Doctor Mouldy (Nicholas Farrell)treats a Bosnian couple w hose child was conceived after the wife was rapedby Serbs, and he invites them to stay in his home.Asthey ride there in a taxi,Elgar's famous Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 celebrates their newlife,but they arrive tofindhe messy reality of the house in wh ich he has livedwith his two sons since his wife left him.

    Stella Bruzzi objects to the film's use of implausible coincidences suchas the Serb and the Croat adversaries finding themselves on the same ward,or Doctor Mouldy treating the pregnant Bosnian wom an in the same hospitaland claims that this falsifies thefilm sdominant realism. Whilethis commenttestifies to the endurance of the realist paradigm in Britishfilmculture, Bruzzidoes go on to situate the filmwithin adistinctly European tradition of surreal-ism, irreverence and anarchic political commentary. '7Thistradition is clearlydominant in afilmhat includes such characters as Griffin (Danny Nussbaum),a London skinhead w ho is accidentally parachuted into Bosnia with reliefsup-plies on which he has fallen asleep when drunk, and Jerry (Gilbert Martin),

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    a Scottish journalist who contracts Bosnia syndrome, in which he identifieswith victims of the war and dem ands to have his leg amputated. sthese ex-amples suggest, eautiful eopleis as much a fairy tale asNotting Hillbutone with much darker overtones.38As Horton indicates, eautiful eopledepicts the world of'Lon don ' asa gumbo of nationalities, refugees and 'natives' who can also feel like aliensin their own land. He adds that whenever Dizdar's camera travels throughthe streets of London, faces of all nationalities appear, suggesting multiplestories that could be told, lives that could be followed w ith similar results. ^Bycontrast, Claire Monk complains of the social cleansing inNottingHill.40 guest at the wedding of the Bosnian refugee and the daughter ofacabinetminister in eautiful eopledeclares that here in England we're a mixedbunch too but assures him that there is no likelihood of ethnic cleansing.Yet black and ethnic inhabitants have virtually disappeared fromNottingHilland while, as Nick James points out, this omission does correspond to the ac-tual process of urban gentrification in which the posh sections have swal-lowed much of the area, it is still noticeable that most of the few nonwhitepeople glimpsed in thefilmbelong to the media entourage surrounding Anna,no t to William's village. 41

    Bothfilmshave Utopian endings, although, as might be expec ted, theirimplications are qu ite different.Themisunderstandings that keep the coupleapart inNotting Hillare overcome w he n William exploits the public ritualsofapress conference to proposetoAnna (Figure79),but thefinalshot placesthem in a space that alludes to traditional myths of Deep England. William issitting with a visibly pregnant Anna in a small fenced park reserved for afflu-ent residen ts of the neighborhood. When they climbed into this park earlier,an inscription on a bench m ade Anna realize that there are couples w ho staytogether, a significant m oment underlined by the cam era pulling up to lookdow n on the green garden from on high, and the happy ending thus involvesa reaffirmation ofloveand family in an idyllic image - although rural Englandis now reduced to a small, isolated park available only to the privileged few.Robin Wood likens the endingof eautiful eopleto that ofascrewballcomedy, but he notes that the utopianism is qualified by a wh ole range ofmore orlesssubtle disturbances. He also argues that, if one of thefilm sproj-ects is the construc tion of the multicultural society, ano ther (closely related)is its redefinition of the notion of'family.' 42The doctor w ho cures Jerry con-vinces him that the world is beautiful - until the doctor mentions his bill -and reunites him with his family. Most of the other families that form at theend of the film are unconventional in some way, with the p roblem of theirlikely endurance more apparen t than inNottingHill.According to Horton, the ending of eautiful eopleoffers a highly pos-itive view of the prospects for the national identity: the chaos and chance of

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    Figure 79. Nott/ngHill The private life of W illiam Hugh Grant) and Anna JuliaRoberts) becomes a media event when he proposes at a press conference.

    each relationship explored suggest the birth of new, potentially positive pos-sibilities and encourage a sense that Britain has changed as it embraces -willingly or not - those w ho have taken up residence within her land. 4' Oth-er critics are less optimistic, including Bruzzi, who concludes that, in all thefreneticism, there is no time to think, wh ich makes its status as a political al-legoryabit of a problem. 44Thisjudgment sounds very similar to James's con-cern thatNotting Hillignores the political reality of a time wh en the Englishare redefining themselves against a background of Scots andWelshdevolutionand the gradual European absorp tion of all the British, w ith the result thatthe film enjoys only the confusion not th e potential for change. 45

    It is a moot po int w he the r comedies should provide political analysis ofthe kind these critics require, but they can provide allegorical representationsof the nation as an imagined community. The difference between the twofilms in this respect is apparent in their treatment of the diasporic groups thatdo not fit easily into traditional versions of national identity, bu t it is also ap-parent in their depiction of cultural differences among citizens of the multi-national nation.InNottingHill William shares his hom e with Spike (Rhys Ifans), a scruffyWelshman whose obnoxious behavior and unreliabilitygivehim a primitivequality that contrasts with the diffidence of the Englishman (although thereis a nagging sense that he rep resents a more extrem e version of qualities in-herent in William's character). He is a genial comic character who ends upengaged to William's sister (Emma Chambers), one of a group of eccentricEnglish characters who cheerfully accept their own social and economic fail-ure.Aswell as the Scottish journalist and his family, eautiful eopleincludesa Welsh Nationalist (Nicholas M cGaughey), who specializes in bom bing theholiday homes of English families and who occupies th e same hospital roomas the Bosnian Serb and Croat DadoJehan and Faruk Pruti) who brawl on a

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    Figure 80 Serb and Croa t refugees Dado ehanand Faruk Pruti) meet on abus and continue their fight in the streets of London in the opening sequenceo f Beautiful People

    London bus in the opening sequence (Figure80). llthree testify to the on-going reality of political division, but they participate in the Utopian endingas they play cards with the Sister (Linda Bassett) who has desperately triedto prevent violence in the ward.Robert Murphy insists that the endingof Notting Hillisnot nostalgic bu tcelebrates the pleasures of middle-class life. 46It has to be admitted that thiscelebration depe nds on the exclusion of much that is included in BeautifulPeople whose ending might be seen as a celebration of the pleasures of lifein a world in which they are constantly threatened by ignorance and intol-erance.Theprecarious pleasures that bothilmsoffer provide support for IenAng's claim that this totalizing system of global capitalism in whic h we areall trapped, is nevertheless a profoundly unstable one, whose closure cannever be completed. 47If the position of British cinema within this systemis often a very uncomfortable one , it seems tha t filmmakers will con tinue toproduce ilmshat engage w ith the evolving myths of national identity in var-ied and unpredictable ways that reinforce, criticize, or challenge these myths.