I’m writing this review almost (three months to the day) since I’ve seen the film. We’ve been in a bit of a retrospective mood for a few weeks: saw the 20th anniversary of the Matrix with Friend, powered through my first viewing of Lawrence of Arabia that wasn’t just clips from that Alien movie, and watched The Prestige with Wife and Friends (their first time was so fun to watch). It’s actually been two months since that introduction to this film. Recently just watched Rocky Horror for the first time, and Godfather Parts 1 and 2, as well as Frozen in anticipating for Frozen 2, which is coming out later this week.
I wholeheartedly recommend this film. It transcends definition as a coming-of-age story, or an immigrant narrative, or a movie about friends growing apart, or even family movie. It is all of those things without losing its threads or feeling overly stuffed or sentimental. Actually, at one point, a friend of Javed’s confronts him about how much he’s been in his own head, piling on with his friend’s dad to make fun of him, and it gives us a moment to critique some of the crummy things the film played for laughs the first time around. There are a number of these moments that can be approached from multiple angles–in tension with one another, pulling at the strands of family and friendship, cultural pride and the joy of cultural discovery, the pull of personal growth and the understanding of the other.
Blinded by the Light does some interesting things with the use of music and headphones, esp during the day party, but also with mixtapes. We’re set up to expect that Javed only wants to interpret his life through the lens of Bruce Springsteen, but the film makes room for an exchange of culture in the other direction, the similarity of his Pakistani friends to that of the New Jersey/American joy he’s tapping into. Wife, if I recall correctly after this long, was not so impressed with the America sequence of this story, because she felt it dragged a bit, but I think it was essential to Javed’s exploration of the American experience, which is in part what I think the film is about. I’ve written a little bit more about this in my review of Wild Rose, where I talk about how these two films have done a wonderful job of making room for directors to talk about the positive aspects of America without seeming like dewy-eyed jingoists or soft-brained sentimentals. I like that Javed never actually is depicted at a Bruce concert, it strays from those kinds of tropic scenes because it has more domestic ambitions.
The politics of the 80s map so well onto the current moment: the rise of white nationalism, the alienation of the individual, anti-immigrant sentiment. At the same time, the film gives us ways of viewing our main character as someone who can both be fulfilling his dreams by splurging a little on tickets for a concert for him and his new girlfriend while also failing to live up to the most meager of expectations on the day of his older sister’s wedding. It paints a complex portrait of a teenager in the spring of his life and the height of poor-decision season.
Worth a look if you have been in the mood for a pick-me-up about America and been found wanting the last four years.
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