Film Review: The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir (2018) - Avoidance of Rooting Causes of Refugees
Ryota Nakanishi- Oct 2, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: May 4, 2024
Dir. Ken Scott (1970-) is not an Indian director, but he is a Canadian director who tried to make this eclectic IKEA film (The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir) for both Bollywood and Hollywood. And the result is mediocre.
The protagonist, Ajatashatru "Aja" Lavash Patel, is a fake magician. He is rather a thief in some ways.
One day, Aja wants to go to Paris after the death of his mother, Siringh, to find their estranged father over there.
When Aja gets trapped in an IKEA wardrobe, this strange journey of Aja begins like the one in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924).
There are many script weak points in this film.
The accidental love romance with the US girl Marie Riviere too depended on a miracle. Is it easy to get such a kind of girl at IKEA in a few lines? It must be a fictional reality of a commercial film by IKEA!
Get a beautiful middle-class US girl who works for an international consulting company in Paris? It is a miracle for poor men.
The poor Bollywood character who represents the ''want to be Bourgeoisie'' dream and falls in love with the rich Hollywood character is a romantic and miraculous structure of this feature-length IKEA commercial film.
Individualism in capitalist society is a ''want to be Bourgeoisie'' dream.
Bourgeoisie's individualist dream of miraculous encounters is this film's ideological feature.
The most typical propaganda=commercial aspect of this film is avoidance of rooting causes of refugees, especially in Libya.
This film only depicts how the bureaucrats of the UK and the Spanish are avoiding the seriousness of the tidal wave of refugees from Africa and the Middle East where their NATO and US allies have bombed for decades for their own sake.
It does only depict some funny diplomatic games among NATO nations on refugee issues.
However, it completely avoids the rooting causes of this tidal wave of refugees from Libya.
Aja just donates to poor Libyan refugees who tell him their individualist dreams until his illegally gained EURs run out. This cannot solve any rooting causes. It is just selling ''want to be Bourgeoisie'' dreams blindly.
This proves the limitations of commercially driven films like this kind of IKEA feature commercial film which exploits the poor. This is far from decent Indian film masterpieces which were recently made.
For instance, the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011) turned his poor country into one where people enjoy the same high living standard as the EU in Africa.
However, US-backed/ France-led NATO military interventions in the Libyan civil war caused the assassination of Gaddafi in 2011. That was a typical US regime change operation as a whole.
You can see the comparison between the Gaddafi era and the post-Gaddafi era in Libyan life below.
GDP per capita was USD$29,000(PPP basis). It is currently USD$11,000(PPP), more than a double drop in living standards. Healthcare for Libyans was free, but now it is estimated that 2.5 million Libyans are in need of healthcare subsidies. Education was free and the illiteracy rate was 20%, but now 600 schools are closed and 270,000 Libyan youngsters have no school to attend. Sectarian violence was unheard of. Now there are tensions among all major clans. Just recently, a pet monkey attack on a schoolgirl sparked deadly clashes between clans which left 20 dead. Household electricity was free and generous subsidies were given for weddings, housing and car purchases. Now Libyans have to pay full price for everything.
It is obvious that implanting the ''want to be Bourgeoisie'' dream is the nature of commercial filmmaking and its limitless is its blindness against rooting causes of social tragedies like the tidal wave of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, where imperialist countries like NATO invaded and colonized. A true artistic cinema should depict the political truth behind these international tragedies.
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