Word: rafi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite the dangers of the neighborhood and the lack of affection between them, Sammy and Rosie live pleasant, lower middle-class lives until Sammy's estranged father, Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) arrives. Once a high-ranking Indian politico, Rafi moves into Sammy and Rosie's apartment with the intention of giving them their substantial inheritance so that they can move into a real house and bless him with grandchildren...
...Rafi poses a problem for these well-intentioned liberals: how can they extend hospitality to and accept money from a man who, instrumental as he was in casting off British imperialism and building Indian democracy, may have used terror and torture...
...Rafi is also a problem because he is an anachronism. His conception of a domestic life for Sammy and Rosie is as out of date as his Machiavellian politics. He does not understand Sammy and Rosie's open marriage anymore than he understands their openly homosexual friends. Sex is inherently political in Sammy and Rosie's circle, and Rafi longs for a bygone world where "a kiss is just a kiss...
...guests of honor are three odd couples: Sammy (Ayub Khan Din), a Pakistani-born accountant, and his American photographer client Anna (Wendy Gazelle); Rosie (Frances Barber), Sammy's wife, a "downwardly mobile" English social worker, and her beau of the evening Danny (Roland Gift), a young black; and Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), Sammy's father, and his old flame Alice (Claire Bloom), a romantic Englishwoman. Is that all clear? No? Don't worry; these lives are not meant to be sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire...
...here is Rafi, who has come to London to escape his old crimes as a despot in the Pakistani government. If Cry Freedom finds easy outrage nestling with the victims of state torture, Sammy & Rosie is prepared at least to make the deathbed that a genial torturer can lie in. But Rafi gets no more or less sympathy than any other character in this exuberant egalitarian stew of a movie. Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive...