My Beautiful Laundrette

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.

Stephen Frears' film of Hanif Kureshi's script about the Pakistani and the NF punk who grew up as friends, and find themselves attracted to each other again. Gordon Warneke and Daniel Day-Lewis play the lovers in this intelligent movie which has a cheap British tinge but has some superb moments (Saeed Jaffrey as Warneke's uncle, ‘a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani') within it.

Perhaps the longest-lasting image is the two boys in the back room of the launderette, splashing each other with water, and putting aside the political differences between them. Whether it truly makes its points about race and sexuality I'm not sure.

A rare instance of magic-realism that actually works in the cinema. The realism is a scrupulously observed portrait of 80s London, its people (entrepreneurs, drunks, racists, wide-boys), locales (dingy flats, delapidated laundrettes, murky car lots) and attitudes (strutting capitalism, dessicated liberalism, farcical extremism).

The magic comes from Frears' style, tweaking and heightening the real; from stylised scenes such as Omar's reuniting with Johnny; from some magical set-pieces, especially the opening of the laundrette, Omar and Johnny making love cut with Nasser and Rachel's waltz; from the clashing of an exotic, Oriental world in a determinedly materialist context.

Kureishi's script is occasionally heavy-handed, but sex is never far from his analyses of power and identity - Omar's crucial tirade against Johnny has a thrilling, Genet-esque frisson.