
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Grade: B
A short while into this one, Mrs. twinsbrewer asked, “who IS that guy? I know him from someplace.” I said, “his first name’s Daniel,” and she yelled “OH WOW.” It’s not that he’s unrecognizable in the role, he’s just got some dyed hair that throws you off identifying him at first. But eventually the nose would give him away. (And it’s a badass nose, too, it makes him look sharp and piercingly smart, like a hawk.) This was his first major role; people noticed.
We don’t meet Day-Lewis for a little bit. The main character is Gordon Warnecke as a young Pakistani Londoner. His mom died a while back, and since then his sweet-natured father (Roshan Seth) has been lost in the bottle. Warnecke is about to head off to college, but before then, he’s gonna make a little money working for his well-off uncle (Saeed Jaffrey). At first, he’s doing grunt work in the uncle’s garage. Later, he takes over managing one of his uncle’s mangy laundromats.
One night, after attending a party at his uncle’s house, Warnecke and some of his relatives are driving home when they’re accosted by racist hooligans, who’re hollering abuse and banging fists on the windows. Warnecke gets out and approaches their ringleader, Day-Lewis. And it’s clear these two have known each other before. Like, REALLY known each other.
Why are there racist hooligans in London? Why, anywhere? Pauline Kael wrote that as the hooligans see it, “‘the “Pakis” were allowed into England to do the dirty work, to be under them, yet are getting ahead of them.’” And it can seem like immigrants and people of immigrant heritage are “taking over everything” because they frequently work in or manage/own the kind of businesses that poorer people patronize; like convenience stores or tobacco stores or laundromats. (They’re not “taking over” the really big-income careers.)
I once had an immigrant gentleman who ran a tobacco store explain to me why you frequently see immigrant owners/workers in such stores. It’s because if you’re good with numbers, but not necessarily the language yet, it’s the kind of business you don’t need to have perfect English to run. The products sell themselves. You just have to maintain the inventory and clean the place, which isn’t too tough because such places aren’t too large. (Speaking English is not an issue among the Pakistanis in this film, they all speak it flawlessly — yet I assume part of the resentment is the same one that Americans have towards “furreners” running the places they go to.)
Why did the brighter Day-Lewis — not only Warnecke’s secret boyfriend, but a friend of his family as well — take up with the hooligans? It’s never explained, exactly, but one senses it was probably a form of inertia. They were his mates, his gang, so if that’s what they were doing, that’s what he was doing. And his role here is to grow beyond it. He rekindles things with Warnecke and starts helping run the laundromat, helping paint and decorate it as his buddies give him the side-eye. Well, he was hanging with them before because he didn’t have anything better to do; now he does.
It’s a teasing relationship he and Warnecke have — they’re both aware the people in their respective worlds wouldn’t be likely to approve. (What’s shown on the Criterion cover is a moment where Day-Lewis is sneaking a sexy move the hooligans can't see.) But what’s remarkable in a movie from this period is how that big expected slipup/reveal/blowup never happens. If Warnecke’s family caught on, they’d probably mostly be upset he wasn’t marrying a nice quiet Pakistani girl. There’s no great gay tragedy here, and it’s a nice relief. (Although their relationship isn’t without rough patches either — when someone dumped you to run with hooligans, you’re gonna harbor a bit of a grudge.)
Of course, that's how I see the relationship NOW — when I first saw this, as a teenager, a few years after it came out, I was a little thrown by the gay stuff. I had as much awareness of gay people as I did Pakistan, maybe even less. (Some of my high school classmates were gay, but I sure didn't get it then.)
I remember a key moment when I was hanging out in a Tower Video, a store I frequently hung out at, to check out the new Criterion releases on LaserDisc. Probably would have been late 80s/early 90s or so. I really liked the store employees, they geeked out over the same movies I did. And one of them had a fight with his boyfriend while I was in the store. Nothing too nasty, just the kind of breakup argument people have.
I remember this really rocking my teenage mind. One, I didn't know the store employee was gay. Two, the argument was just a standard breakup argument, I'd seen those (I wouldn't have my own for some time yet, but I was familiar with the dynamic).
“Huh,” I thought. “They’re just as miserable as everybody else, sometimes love sucks.”
Now, clearly, you want to roll your eyes at my teenage self and say “of COURSE they're just like everybody else, you moron!”
But I DID grow up in a super-fundamentalist household. So it took me a lot longer to understand some pretty simple things. It's entirely possible that there are some pretty simple things I'm still pretty dumb about, today! But those ones are my fault. The weird upbringing, I learned it was goofy at the speed I learned it. Don't be TOO judgy. And, in any case, movies like this one helped! So, back to the movie…
The uncle, Saeed Jaffrey, is really a lot of fun, here. He’s a little bit of a Thatcher-era greed-is-good sleaze; he’s a sh***y landlord, and tolerates another family member who’s kind of a crummy drug-dealing jerk type (it’s the only really annoying role in the entire movie.) But Jaffrey comes off as a guy who’s enjoying being a sleaze, and wants Warnecke/Day-Lewis to enjoy it, too. What’s the point of having money if you don’t get to have a good time and help your family/friends?
He’s got a nice rapport at the end, too, with Roshan Seth (Warnecke’s stuck-in-the-bottle dad). Seth’s fine here, although a weird piece of casting; he was only 43 when this came out, and has to wear a very silly white-hair wig to look older (which he doesn’t). Both actors were established stage veterans; Seth in Britain, Jaffrey in Britain, India, and America, where he worked with Actors’ Studio legend Lee Strasberg. Incidentally, none of the actors playing Pakistanis is actually Pakistani! But many have Indian heritage, which is close.
The movie’s written by accomplished British Pakistani playwright/novelist Hanif Kureishi, who (per Graham Fuller’s Criterion essay) delivered this script by dropping it through director Stephen Frears’s mailbox! Frears was an experienced television director, with two low-budget films under his belt (including 1984’s The Hit, which is also very good). This was originally shot for TV, in 16mm; after it got great response at a festival showing, it was given wider release and did quite well. Frears would soon go on to things like Dangerous Liasons and The Grifters; he’s one of the finest directors around.
Kael wrote “‘Frears has refined a magical instinct for just how long we want to see a face and just how long a scene needs to be. If he could bottle this instinct, it could be called “‘Essence of Moviemaking.’” As with all directors, he’s only as good as the scripts, and the bad ones end up feeling like Frears has a TERRIBLE instinct for how long to put things on the screen. But when he’s got a good one, like this or The Hit or A Very British Scandal, the results are near-perfect. At one point he requested a crane for one day for this film and kinda forgot about it; when he got the crane for a few hours, he had to improvise something to do with the thing. Which he did, a big shot up over the roof of the laundromat and back down to the street below. It comes at just the right spot for the story, and it’s a terrific shot. (Congrats to cinematographer Oliver Stapleton for that, too, he's terrific.)
I did say near-perfect; this isn’t perfect. You wish the ladies were a little more fleshed out. (The uncle’s daughter, who’s a fun rebel sort, and the uncle’s mistress, a fairly age-appropriate British lady). Although both actors (Rita Wolf and Shirley Anne Field) are quite interesting to watch, the movie doesn’t seem very concerned with what happens to them at the end. In a badly-shot moment, the daughter just disappears. (It’s minor but it did annoy me.) And the mistress gets mystically cursed, it seems, by the uncle’s wife, and it causes a rash? That kinda came at me from outta the blue.
The climax is very satisfying, though. There’s been a big grand opening of the landromat’s new design, which draws a huge number of attendees (which is silly in a movie way, so you accept it), and everything kinda goes haywire. All the frazzled plot threads come apart at the same time, and Frears still keeps the mood fairly mellow. It’s not played for laughs, but it’s not out to gut-punch or shock you, either. It’s just, yeah, you can see how this escalated quickly.
Kael again (sorry, it’s a good review!): “It’s an enormous pleasure to see a movie that’s really about something, and that doesn’t lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easy. (It’s down before you notice it.)” I think that says it well, and says what Frears does well in the best of his movies; it won’t feel like a meaning’s being pushed on you, you’re just caught up in what the characters are feeling.
Of course this has additional relevance now, after Brexit was passed in Britain ostensibly to stop “new” immigration, but really as a reaction to decades of immigration that’d already taken place. (Or maybe I’m projecting; but I feel like a huge number of Americans just can’t get over the fact that Sesame Street taught kids words like “agua,” so I can imagine Brits doing the same thing.)
Naturally I’m of the camp that thinks hating on immigrants is wrong, stupid, and bad policy to boot. There’s also a particular irony in hating people orginally from countries your country did great damage to. When Britian ruled Pakistan, they weren’t exactly benevolent. So people from those countries should be welcomed, as a kind of apology! Of course, that would mean America should welcome Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, etc., etc., and we don’t have a good record of that. But, you know, in an ideal world, we would.