Review: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) *** 1/2
Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in My Beautiful Laundrette
Set in the cauldron of conflict between classes, races, sexes and sexualities in ’80s Thatcher-era London, Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette is not only a terrific slice of life drama, it’s also a sort of time capsule from another time and place and a quintessential art film from the 1980s.
Gordon Warnecke is Omar, the college aged son of Pakistani immigrants. His father, played by Roshan Seth (Gandhi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), was a journalist and an important intellectual back in Karachi, but in London in 1985, he’s just another ‘wog’ as immigrants are derisively referred to by the locals. He’d like his son to go to college, but as he himself deteriorates from alcoholism following the death of his wife, he stands as a stark reminder of how little an education is worth in this environment.
Omar sees another path to success and he turns to his shady uncle Nasser, played by Saeed Jaffrey (Gandhi, A Passage to India). While his brother is content to waste away into a bottle of vodka, the gregarious Nasser has carved out a measure of material success as a slum lord, through his chain of parking garages and laundrettes, and possibly through illegal means as well.
Starting out washing cars for Saeed, Omar works his way up to ownership of one of the laundrettes in a seedy area of London. The place is a dump and the neighborhood seethes with racial tension as the lower classes take out their frustrations on the immigrants who are flocking to the area. For protection and muscle, Omar enlists the help of local gang member Johnny played by Daniel Day-Lewis. As a member of a racist gang himself, Johnny would seem an unlikely ally of Omar, but it turns out the two have a secret past from their school days.
Like the story itself, Omar seems adrift at the beginning of the film, caught between Pakistani and English worlds and unsure of what to make of himself. As played by newcomer Warnecke, he appears open, friendly and naive, but there’s a crafty ruthlessness to him that is only revealed as the story progresses. This is a man who will get somewhere and he’ll do it with a smile on his face, but he’s not beyond using people or playing the angles as they present themselves.
To those who are most familiar with his more recent films, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Johnny might come as a bit of a surprise. Here he’s a punk and a thug, but he’s also sensitive and he dreams of a better life. Quiet and capable of tenderness one minute, he is full of potential violence the next. Like Omar, Johnny is also caught between worlds: a dead end life on the dole with his friends who accept him or a life as a legitimate businessman with people who see him as an outsider.
Oozing socio-political overtones, but never quite hitting you over the head with them, Laundrette sounds heavy yet it’s all played with a light touch. This isn’t a comedy, but it’s not deadly serious either.
The story, by playwright Hanif Kureishi (born in London to an Indian father and English mother) has many characters and multiple threads and it’s not always precisely clear where the narrative is taking you. Kurieshi adds layer upon layer to the story until the whole thing seems like it’s going to collapse under it’s own weight, but somehow it never does. In the end it’s not where the story is going that is important, but where it has been. It doesn’t matter if or how the different plots resolve themselves or where the different characters end up. Ultimately you’re left with a unique impression of a certain period in English social history that might seem strange nearly 25 years later.
The synthesizer score composed by Ludus Tonalis (produced by Hans Zimmer) sounds exactly like it was made in 1985, which it was, but rather than badly dating the film, it adds to the film’s time capsule feeling.
Originally intended for British television, My Beautiful Laundrette was just the third feature film from Stephen Frears who would go on to direct Prick up Your Ears, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters and The Queen among others. Aside from being an exceptional film, it’s also a reminder of a kind of golden age of cinema before Sundance was king, when indie or arthouse films weren’t synonymous with the emo adventures of quirky, angsty teenagers and important social issues could be addressed naturally and entertainingly without preaching or heavy handedness.
My Beautiful Laundrette. UK 1985. Directed by Stephen Frears. Written by Hanif Kureishi. Starring Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke and Shirley Ann Field. 1 hour 33 minutes. MPAA Rating: R. 3.5 stars (out of 5) - Available on DVD.
Filed under: Retro, Reviews
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Oh, Craig, you really won me over with “…it’s also a reminder of a kind of golden age of cinema before Sundance was king, when indie or arthouse films weren’t synonymous with the emoe adventures of quirky, angsty teenagers…”
Amen!
Today’s “indie” seems as prepackaged and corporate-molded as the next summer tentpole release.
It’s a fine film, though, with a great Day-Lewis performance. Stephen Frears is one of the more undervalued directors out there. He doesn’t always hit homers but, despite being a little uneven in the 1990s after The Grifters, still remains substantial and consistent.
Dammit, now I can’t really postpone catching up with this, can I?
By the way, I overcame my new-blog-writing-block. Thanks for your welcome to Wordpress message!
You’re right Alexander. Indie has become a marketing tool. Back in the mid 80s, people just made movies.
This one wasn’t perfect, but it really put me back in the days when I was in high school and college.
If you like DDL or Frears Hedwig, you really have to check this one out. I have fond memories of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as well, but it’s not as well regarded and I haven’t seen it in a million years…also I’m not even sure it’s on DVD.
Anyway, glad to hear you overcame the writer’s block Hedwig. I hate when that happens.
Yeah, I was thinking of Sammie and Rosie watching this too. Odd little social drama from the early Frears, but that was his bread and butter back then. There are a couple of bravura director moments that come and go but the storytelling is fairly straight-forward otherwise, which works well for this story. He could easily be heavy-handed about it but he’s so non-chalant that it defuses much of the melodrama. Nicely done. It’s weird to watch an unpolished foreign indie from this time period…as Alexander said, indie films today are rarely like this one anymore. When they are, we get Day Night Day Night (sorry, couldn’t help it).
Odd to think that you could take this story and supplant it to modern day America and it would work fairly well. Little has changed between Thatcher’s England and W’s America.
I liked Daniel Day Lewis in this one but I thought Warnecke was a little uneven and rough. I have to give him credit for being a newcomer amongst so many veteran character actors though.
I think the most interesting part of it all for me was how it transported me back to a time when I was a budding movie snob.
You’re right about Warnecke being sort of a weak link, but he fit the character pretty well. Besides DDL though, the movie was carried by a pretty good supporting cast.
Yep, the supporting cast was excellent for a movie of this size and scope.
I wish indie movies would return to this kind of form. Kind of edgy and different…not all carbon copies of one another…but still a part of the public consciousness. It seems to me you’d hear more mainstream critics talking about this kind of thing and average people were more aware of them.
Hell, the screenplay for Laundrette got an Oscar nomination.
I think it’s interesting that Tarantino received so much blame in the ’90s for transforming the “indie” and its “general vibe.” I can’t tell you how many documentaries I’ve seen about how at Sundance, before Reservoir Dogs, “nobody died in a Sundance movie–unless they died of AIDS.”
It wasn’t Tarantino’s fault that, through success, he would be emulated.
In this decade, the “indie” has embraced “the quirk,” and the Little Miss Sunshine-Juno stretch is most emblematic of that.
I agree, Craig, the 1980s, which are often disparaged for not being as ostentatiously great as the 1970s, boasted a higher film culture in relation to the general population than what we have today for the most part.
The only people to blame for ‘ruining’ Sundance and by extension Indie Cinema are the money people. By wanting to recapture the popular success of Sex Lies and Reservoir Dogs et al., they’ve begun suffering the same problems as the mainstream movies to which indies should be an alternative: they’re becoming bland, carbon copy, safe product.
Funny, when I think of nomenclature “indie films” I think of stuff regularly shown on the Sundance channel a few years back when I watched it that wasn’t so much quirky as boring – grainy low-budget fare with poor lighting and jerky handheld camera movement focused on self-involved 20 somethings sitting around trying to figure out who they are and what life means. Riveting stuff :-)
Some of that stuff is maybe a reaction to the blanding of so-called indie films. This is what’s great about films like Laundrette, they strike a balance in between. They provide an alternative without going to extremes.