This is a little gem of a movie, buried in the back of the drama section at the video store and forgotten.
My Beautiful Laundrette is the perplexing story of a young English-Pakistani man trying to scratch out a living in Thatcher era England. His name is Omar, and it’s never really evident what he wants, other than money and love although he seems to foolishly throw away both.
Omar is a Pakki for sure and he tiptoes the lines of racial hatred nearly everyday. Racism is so ubiquitous in this film that the characters rarely get fazed by it.
Strange it is, though, that Omar’s best friend, Johnny, is a white deadbeat who marched with the National Front.
My Beautiful Laundrette is remarkable in that it sparked the careers of two prominent people the film was directed by Stephen Frears, who went on to direct Dangerous Liasons and High Fidelity, and Johnny is played by the fantastic Daniel Day Lewis, who would go on to act in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Gangs of New York.
Daniel Day Lewis, sporting a blond tipped punk hairdo, looks dangerously like Vanilla Ice, back in the throes of the Ice, Ice Baby craze.
While Vanilla Ice was trying to convince People Magazine that he was a real player (‘Someone shot at me, once, I swear! I used to be a pimp, really!’), Day-Lewis doesn’t need to speak a damn word to suit the role of an angry white punk, looking for a better life.
My Beautiful Laundrette seems to take an obvious road showing the disillusionment of the children of immigrants, the struggle in being accepted by either culture. This is a too-often explored theme, and My Beautiful Laundrette would suffer from it, as well as the commentary on ultra capitalism and the portrait of a family.
Except that the movie takes a decidedly homosexual turn, complicating the story and tangling up the concepts.
This is where the film truly shines; reality doesn’t have neat, storybook themes and messages, and questions often have no answers. My Beautiful Laundrette shows gritty English life, with piles of problems, but no satisfactory resolutions.
At the end, I went ‘Huh?’ and tried to fast forward past the end. It didn’t feel like a movie could end like that, without a thrilling conclusion or a surprise ending. But then, my life hasn’t met with a thrilling conclusion, either.
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