Mein wunderbarer Waschsalon

For its time MBL was a break through movie. London is a very complicated place for colonials and for punks. As the friendship between the boys develops- complications arise. What I liked about this film was its unpretentiousness. You can hear and almost smell the various neighborhoods of London. And Daniel Day Lewis certainly showed his potential for the star he would become.

We saw this movie when it was first released on the big screen. It just happen to start when we needed a movie to so we had no idea what to expect. What a pleasant surprise this film was. Daniel Day Lewis (in one of his earliest roles) stars with Gordon Warnecke in this unconventional love story. Warnecke plays young Omar, who is given the opprtunity to run his uncle's laundrette. He enlists the aid of his ex-lover, Johnny (played by Lewis) to get the business back on it's feet. The scene in the laundrette that includes Omar and Johnny in the foreground and Omar's uncle and his mistress in the background, is one of the most sensual celluloid scenes I ever scene.

If you are looking for something good and out of the ordinary, I would recommend this one.

Want to see a side of London you won't get from any other director? Then watch My Beautiful Launderette... The film opens with a scene in which squatters are forcibly evicted from a derelict building. Londoner viewers will recognize this as a sad yet common event... Immediately, we are attuned to the political bent of the movie. Fortunately for that intent, the dialogue in the film is intelligently written (note: this will not appeal to the lowest common denominator -- it scores low on commercial appeal). Unfortunately, the often "stiff" delivery of that dialogue is a significant impediment. That said, Daniel Day Lewis lends a powerful presence to his role as the punk squatter, Johnny.

The climax of the film aptly integrates the various tensions in the film: political, sexual, and social. We're surprised with a love scene between Johnny and Omar which is well-paced, erotic, and genuine.

Johnny and Omar live in a world of multiple cogenerating, coexisting, modifying, negating, enforcing and enhancing forms of discrimination -- racism, sexism, groupism, homophobia, cultural elitism, snobbery, reverse colonialism, neocolonialism and fascism -- which they successfully grapple and topple in the form of their launderette with the power of economic enterprise. These squabbling goblins are left to each others excesses as economic success lifts them up and out of these, but many questions remain: will they remain; would others succeed; what does luck have to do with it? Kureshi has pissed off all groups who find themselves part of this smashing satire, prime among them the identity conscious confused second/third generation Subcontinental British kids, the same contingency that staunchly supported the Rushdie fatwa. Brilliant and stupendously enjoyable.

This colorful slice of lowbrow English life has many things working in its favor: character, ingenuity, humor, and (the essential asset for such a modest production) unpredictability. What it doesn't have is a budget, making the film look and sound like a cheap made-for-TV movie, hardly surprising since it was, in fact, produced for British television (a remarkably permissive institution, by American network standards at the time). But a well-written script doesn't (fortunately) need to cost an arm and a leg, and the perceptive screenplay by Hanif Kureishi has a lot on its mind, tossing off social, sexual, and political commentary with subtle insight and brazen wit. It may seem as if his story, about an unemployed (and otherwise unmotivated) young Pakistani and his amiable Anglo-Punk boyfriend, who conspire to beat the system by opening a trendy, upscale Laundromat using money stolen from a local crime syndicate, relies at times too heavily on idiosyncratic behavior and eccentric charm (other films should have such problems). But it all ends happily ever after, doubly so for director Stephan Frears and actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who were both catapulted into the international arena by the film's success.