Last night, at NYU’s Cantor Film Center, Hanif Kureishi didn’t want to sit through his film “My Son the Fanatic” and went for a beer and oysters at the nearby Knickerbocker Bar and Grill. Returning five minutes before the movie ended, all he saw was the conversation between Parvez, the Om Puri character, talking to his wife and then Bettina, the prostitute played by Rachel Griffiths. There was a question from the audience about fundamentalism and Kureishi said that having just watched that scene toward the end it struck him that “the film was really about a man leaving a woman for another woman, something which had happened to me. The fundamentalism stuff was less important.” In other words, one sticks to one’s obsessions throughout one’s writing career. I asked him whether the new films made by British Asians, films like “Bradford Riots,” while political and intense, didn’t also leave a smaller canvas for artists to explore. Kureishi said that he wouldn’t have written “My Son the Fanatic” now. “When a subject is so public, it is dead. It is pointless now. It is not a secret anymore. When I did “My Beautiful Laundrette” it was the first gay film. Now all films are gay.” You have to write from the margins, and the margins can only be found on the margins. That is why he wrote “Venus.” It is his subject at the moment, what he called “senior sexuality.”

The photo above is of the room where Hanif Kureishi writes. The link was sent to me by Sukhdev Sandhu, the organizer of the film festival that Kureishi had come to inaugurate.

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