The Big Sick (2017)

What’s my stance on 9/11? Oh um, anti. It was a tragedy, I mean we lost 19 of our best guys. In present day Chicago, Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) is a Pakistani comic who meets an American graduate student in psychology named Emily (Zoe Kazan) at one of his stand-up shows. They have sex on the first date and as their relationship blossoms, he soon becomes worried about what his traditional Moslem parents will think of her. His mother brings prospective brides (for an expected arranged marriage) to their weekly family dinner, something Kumail doesn’t admit until Emily finds a tin box filled with the women’s photos called The Ex-Files, in homage to his favourite TV show. Then she admits she was married as an undergraduate. They break up. When Emily suddenly comes down with an illness that means she must be placed in an induced coma, which Kumail has to approve, he finds himself developing a bond with her deeply concerned mother (Holly Hunter) and father (Ray Romano) who travel from South Carolina to keep a bedside vigil and know all about him, but his parents know nothing about her. And he’s got to get a spot in the Montreal Comedy Festival …. A culture clash romcom that feels plugged into a political charger, taking place in reverse:  have sexual relations, get to know each other, split up, meet the parents. While Emily lies in a coma the difficult intercultural exchanges take place:  a kind of discourse over Sleeping Beauty (although she has a complex about her looks stemming from high school bullying) that presumably has some deeper significance about white women.  A romantic comedy in which one of the protagonists is mainly unconscious is daring if not foolhardy except that this is all about him, you see, the Pakistani navigating his ethnicity in America. The culture wars that take place end up being defused in a comedy club and are stimulating because they then wind up being resolved through common humanity involving putting down ignorant white frat boys wearing baseball caps making jokes about Islamic terrorists.  A plea for understanding? Probably, but mainly for Kumail. Quelle surprise. This autobiographical work was written by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon (who presumably has Stockholm Syndrome), directed by Michael Showalter.

Julie and Julia (2009)

What an intriguing idea New Yorker Julie Powell had:  to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year. And what an intriguing idea Nora Ephron had:  to combine Powell’s account of her food blog with Child’s own account of how she came to learn to cook in France immediately after World War 2 . This isn’t just about two cooks and a lot of food memories. It’s also about two very interesting marriages of equals – a trope that carries through the twin strands of this cooking story as the transatlantic tale smoothly whisks us through these women’s lives as they cope with their own private traumas (which have their larger correlative in 9/11 and WW2/Cold War paranoia). Of course Meryl gets the lion’s share of our interest – apart from anything else, how short did everyone else in the cast have to be to persuade us that she could be six-two?! Her joy is infectious. And the story problem:  is a blog writer really as fascinating as Child whose TV appearances are legendary? And does a call centre operator (albeit for 9/11 victims’ families) moving from Brooklyn to Queens really equate to moving to France not speaking a word of the language and giving up your career (Child was in the OSS)?  The narrative imbalance is efficiently handled with other elements – performance not being the least but Adams’s drabness is an occasional irritant when compared with Streep’s effervescence and Stanley Tucci’s suave turn as her husband. Child’s experiences with French ladies who lunch is paralleled with Powell’s, who makes the cover of a magazine labelled a thirtysomething failure by a journalist among her circle of careerist friends. The women’s lives did cross directly, but with mixed results. With the right combination of ingredients,  Ephron shows how to sift through all of the similarities and differences to concoct quite a mouthwatering feast albeit a souffle rather than a boeuf bourgignon. And boy am I hungry right now: do not watch without ready access to sustenance. Bon appetit!