Stephen Frears | My Beautiful Launderette / 1985

margaret thatcher wins the gay vote

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanif Kureishi (screenplay), Stephen Frears (director) My Beautiful Launderette / 1985

 

Although Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Launderette is generally described as a comedy, and it often behaves as one, even ending somewhat positively, I cannot help feeling every time I watch this film, a bit dispirited, even depressed. I might almost describe the work as bleak. Perhaps it is just realistic.

     On the surface, I know I ought to feel happy for the gay couple at the center of this work. Both are beautiful men, Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke) a handsome Pakistani man, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) a good-looking British punk, who begins the film as a street tough, beating up on the Pakis who have found success in Thatcher's United Kingdom while their own families and themselves do without.

     Omar, living with his alcoholic father seems to have an impossibly temperate personality as he cleans and up and cooks for his bitter Papa, a former journalist who hates the London in which he lives and intends to raise a son who will be well-educated. He clearly would prefer to be back in Pakistan but has lost any wealth he once had. The film gets underway when he sends Omar to work for his brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), who, as he later describes it, has learned to "squeeze the tits of the system." He puts Omar to work in his garage washing cars.

      Nassar has only a daughter, but his symbolic son, Salim (Derrick Branche), a young man he has taken on, earns his way by trafficking drugs. Just as he had joyfully served his father, Omar now pleasantly washes cars:

 

                              Papa: Tell me one thing because there's something I

                                        don't understand, though it must be my fault.

                                        How is it that scrubbing cars can make a son

                                        of mine look so ecstatic?

                             Omar: It gets me out of the house.

 

     In fact, Omar is incredibly ambitious, but in his quiet way he moves forward more quickly than if he had shown his intentions. For, within a few days, he has been introduced to Nasser's daughter Tania (Rita Wolf) with the intention of marrying the two and has been promoted by Nasser to take over a rotting launderette.

     By coincidence, Salim, his wife Cherry, and Omar are accosted by a gang of British thugs, led by Johnny, an old school chum of Omar's. Completely unfazed by the incident, Omar leaves the car, approaching Johnny:

 

                              Johnny: Like me friends?

                              Omar: Ring us then.

                              Johnny: I will. [indicates the car where Cherry is getting very

                                  angry] Leave 'em there. We can do something. Now. Just us.

 

     What quickly becomes apparent is that the two have had a sexual relationship, and now are quite ready to resume it, despite the vast differences in their stars, and before you can say Lahore the two are fucking in the back of Omar's launderette, for which Omar hires Johnny to help him remodel. For these two, love and money seem to be the tie that binds; as soon as Johnny has been hired, he leaves his gang of toughs, and the two men, stealing drugs from one of Salim's deliveries, transform their little rundown laundry into the beautiful launderette of the film's title.

     Of course, there are complex interludes, revealing a few of the differences between them: Omar is still expected to marry Tania and even proposes to her, the gang eventually comes down upon both Omar and Johnny, and as their shop is about to open, Nassar almost catches them at sex. And then there's Salim to report to for that little drug heist, which forces them into a robbery where we briefly see them accosting a young girl who has heard their entry into the house. But love and money seem to lubricate the wheels just enough that you know these two will succeed in life. Omar may never get to college, Nassar loses his British mistress, and Tania, running away from home, simply disappears between two speeding trains. Has she jumped onto the tracks?

     But with the final splash of suds as Omar and Johnny minister one another, wiping away the bruises of their encounter with the gang, we know they're going to get on just fine in this British capitalist world, while Omar's father will pine away in bed for the son he has lost.

     One can well understand why these two boys feel such love for one another, unlike Ang Lee's cowboys of Brokeback Mountain: both are blessed with movie-star looks. But it is almost impossible that they might truly patch up the vast differences of their pasts. Even though they are both outsiders, inside they must necessarily be still bruised by societal differences that are little explored in Hanif Kureishi's glib fairy tale. We might take notice of two changes in these men: the former teetotaler Omar is drinking heavily by film's end. And Johnny has become quite fashion conscious. Margaret Thatcher has clearly won!     

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2020).