A Fond Kiss (2004)

The Trouble with Love:
Ken Loach’s moving interracial love story
set in Scotland

The present: Glasgow, Scotland. Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian-born Pakistani, collects his fifteen-year-old sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) from high school. As he starts to drive her home, she is insulted by a group of boys from her class—one of them spits on the windshield.

Enraged, Tahara leaps out of the car and starts after them. Casim follows. The boys run into the school. The chase leads past startled pupils and teachers, through corridors and up stairways, before two of the boys are cornered in a classroom.

Casim tries to drag Tahara away from the boys. The school’s music teacher Roisin Hanlon (Eva Birthistle) restores order. She orders the boys to leave. She is sympathetic to Tahara—understanding that she’s been insulted.

Unfortunately, in the scuffle, a guitar has been broken.

The next day, Casim waits outside the school for Roisin—ready to give her a replacement guitar. When he discovers she doesn’t have a car, he offers to drive her home.

As they cross the city, Casim asks Roisin to duck down. Laughing, she asks why. He explains they’re passing a store that one of his relatives owns, and adds, “If they see me in the car with a strange woman, there’ll be trouble.”

It is clear Roisin and Casim are attracted to each other. He arranges with some friends to deliver a grand piano to her second-floor apartment. After their clumsily attempts to carry it up the stairs, Roisin is relieved to discover the piano still can be played. With one finger, Casim picks out the notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

He returns to the street but, before he gets into his car, he hears Roisin improvising on the tune. He whistles. When she looks out of a window, he invites her to go to the nightclub at which he is the DJ.

At the nightclub, Casim is annoyed when Tahara arrives with two friends. He makes her leave—but this is only a mild harbinger of the trouble that lies ahead.

Casim is disturbed when he discovers Roisin has already been married. And, his father and mother Tariq and Sadia Khan (Ahmad Riaz and Shamshad Akhatar) have arranged a marriage for him. They are even building an extension to their house in which they believe Casim and his bride—soon arrive from Pakistan—will live.

The Irish-Catholic Roisin, a much more recent immigrant to Glasgow than the Khans, feels betrayed when she discovers Casim is engaged. And then she has difficulties with keeping her job at the Catholic high school—because of her relationship with Casim.

The troubles caused by the couple are explored in A Fond Kiss, the fifth collaboration between veteran director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty. The movie takes its title from Robert Burns’ poem of lost love—

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae farweel, alas, for ever!"

When Loach makes movies, he does not rehearse with his actors and, when he films each scene, he leaves them unsure of exactly how their co-actors will react. With this method, he obtains fresh, often surprising performances.

His actors in A Fond Kiss unerringly reveal the difficulties caused for them by Casim and Roisin’s relationship. They include John Yule, as the headmaster who is pressured to dismiss Roisin; Ghizala Avan, playing Casim’s older sister Rukshana, whose own arranged marriage, with which she is perfectly happy, is threatened when Casim attempts to break off his engagement; and Riaz and Akhatar who show how Casim’s parents feel disgraced by their son’s actions. And Atta Yakub and Eva Birthistle beautifully capture the turmoil of feelings felt by Casim and Rosin, themselves.

A Fond Kiss is a complex, moving love story.


—John Bloomfield (December, 2004)