When a British-Pakistani rapper’s body turns against him
Daniel Nelson
Second generation migrants who adopt the mores – and often the music – of the country of their birth, to the disapproval and consternation of their bewildered parents, is a well-worn film theme. Mogul Mowgli has enough energy and drama to inject a fresh, urgent voice into the concept.
And embedded in this story of a South Asian musician is a warning about the potentially catastrophic danger to health of rejecting your family culture and seeking validation and acceptance from, in this case, “an audience, from Twitter, from America”.
British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed steals the show with a terrific performance, strikingly echoing a previous role as a rock drummer going deaf. This time he’s a scorchingly ambitious rapper stopped in his New York tracks by a sudden degenerative illness.
His physical panic is matched by the emotional upheavals of dealing with the strained renewal of relations, after two years, with his British family, and particularly his conservative father. On top of that awkward slice of life and coping with a terrifying disability, he has to deal with his waning power over a lightweight rap rival who favours twerking videos and macho chants over our hero’s socially serious rhymes.
Ahmed is on screen for virtually the entire film, which he co-wrote – indeed, co-everything’d.
It’s basically a simple tale, sparely told apart from occasional disturbing dream sequences harking back to the horrors of Partition, and a heart-warming but rushed ending.
But, wait. Riz Ahmed has said in an interview (https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zy8b/riz-ahmed-bassam-tariq-mogul-mowgli-interview-2020) that his character’s sudden illness is not a chance occurrence: “Home is something that we often try and escape, but we will always hunger for, and his lack of self-acceptance is partly what the film is about.
“His autoimmune condition is his body not recognising himself, rejecting himself, attacking himself. It's an internalised self-hate. That idea – emotionally and thematically – certainly I can relate to, and I think a lot of people can. We're looking out there for something that we need to find in here, and that's acceptance and love. It's not a prosaic thing – that actually causes illness. Populations who live in diaspora, who experience minority stress, are much more likely to suffer from autoimmune illnesses where our bodies literally do reject themselves, literally do tear themselves apart. If you look at the legacy of epigenetic trauma, whether it's genocide or slavery or war or Partition, it's real.”
That’s a serious dimension some viewers may miss, because it’s not as obvious as migrant parent-children problems.
The lesson is that you don’t have to spell out every awkward issue in a film: just touching on them in a drama can be equally effective.