A year ago on this blog, I speculated about whether the fragmented, non-linear narrative that re-emerged in the noughties as the best method of tossing a net over the globalised decade's intertwinings and complexities was gone for good. Some people had questioned, especially after Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, whether the form had anything deeper than "We're all connected" Benettonisms to offer – a criticism that resurfaced in reviews of the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas (well, I enjoyed it!).
The New Disorder – as David Denby termed it in his essay for the New Yorker – has certainly lost some of its timezone-flyby thrill, as maybe globalisation itself did after the credit crunch. But the world hasn't got any less complicated. Its tangle of overlapping cultures, and the heightening pace of change, still throw particular challenges at storytellers. If non-linear jigsaws were too superficial, then old-school linear narrative – of the sort practised by Hollywood – is too lodged in a single, self-serving perspective. One sign of this is what I like to call "the Villain Problem": Hollywood used to be quite happy, viewing the world down the sight of an American gun, to label Russians or Arabs or whoever as its bad guys. But that's impossible these days without offending someone, possibly even a paying audience segment. Psychopaths, terrorists, genetically modified freaks, even all three at once (well done, the new Star Trek), are about all that is left in the cupboard.
A pair of new releases this week suggest that it might be possible for the global film to thread a way between oversimplifying and overelaboration. The Reluctant Fundamentalist and A Hijacking both take completely disparate elements of 21st-century life, in the way of the noughties global-hopping picture, and attempt to fuse them into a traditional, coherent story: Manhattan high finance and the madrassas of Lahore in the former; a Copenhagen boardroom and Somalian piracy in the other.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is probably the more ambitious work, covering serious ground as it attempts to marry the ideologies that have driven the geopolitics of the last decade: global capitalism and Islamic militancy. Riz Ahmed excels as Changez, a young Pakistani maverick who wows Wall Street but then has a Damascene conversion on the road away from 9/11.
Director Mira Nair aspires to see our world through both (equally distorting) sides of the prism – but The Reluctant Fundamentalist only flickers with insight into how the west and the rest view, and influence, each other. She has specialised in sitting between the two camps in her past work, but perhaps it's telling that the film runs, finally, on American lines: it's governed by a reductive (and lumpily executed) thriller dynamic that inhibits exploration of ambiguous issues. Instead there is the crude suggestion that extremes such as capitalism and religious fanaticism are mirror images – but The Reluctant Fundamentalist relies completely on those extremes to manufacture drama. Not quite the rueful Graham Greene-esque inhabitation of a grey area promised by the title.
In some ways A Hijacking (Kapringen), a Danish film by Tobias Lindholm, deals with the same subject matter: violence committed against affluent westerners by the excluded. But, limiting its action to a stricken Indian Ocean cargo ship and the Copenhagen offices of its owners, it's far more tautly dramatised.
As the negotiations over ransom money drag out into weeks and months, there's more room to pick out incongruities and subtleties on each side. In the boardroom, as ice-cool CEO Søren Malling strains to reduce the payout, there's the nagging sense that, behind the concern and the talk of not appeasing terrorists, the crew are part of a worldwide commodity chain, with a price. On the ship, culture clash comes into play to queasy effect: the cook, played by Pilou Asbæk, is forced to slaughter a goat in order to prepare a meal for his captors. They probably don't think twice about how abnormal doing this is for a European; but, containing all the implicit violence hovering above him and his shipmates, it's this act that finally breaks him.
Lindholm helped script Borgen, so perhaps these levels of scrutiny and delicacy are to be expected. It shows how dampening the wanderlust of its noughties predecessors can compress and amplify the moral force of these global stories. To use the old chaos-theory metaphor of a butterfly causing a storm on the other side of the world, perhaps Babel and its ilk got too fixated on the grandeur of the storm, and there's more scope to put the wings under lucid magnification. And A Hijacking is still as formally elegant as Babel, alternating crisply between air-conditioned conference room and fly-plagued ship's dorm. Its successes, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist's failings, show how the severe juxtapositions of 21st-century life are still putting pressure on narrative to evolve. Or perhaps we should call that opportunity.
• Next week's After Hollywood looks at the rise of the Muslim blockbuster. Which global cinematic stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.
