August 30, 2012
Venice, Italy
Two men meet, one American, the other Pakistani, in a café in Lahore. The latter tells the former, possibly an intelligent agent, the story of the Pakistani’s education at Princeton, his work as a financial analyst, his great love affair with an American beauty, and then his abandonment of America in the aftermath of 9/11. The beauty, named Erica, is played by Kate Hudson (left at the Venice Film Festival premier) in a new Mira Nair film based on Mohsin Hamid’s novel of the same name, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In this spare, elegant story Hamid describes how cross-cultural delight and cosmopolitanism ends in disillusionment and resentment—a haunting parable for Pakistan, and indeed for most of the world’s, experience with America.
—Lucas Wittmann
