Forty years ago, My Beautiful Laundrette would have been the jewel in the crown (or, as one character in the film puts it, "the jewel in the jacksie") of the annual Film on Four season: TV-adjacent but expansive, at once characterful and acutely alert to the ways of the wider world. This was a collision of worlds and sensibilities, both before and behind the camera. The screenwriter was the up-and-coming Hanif Kureishi, working towards a portrait of a close-knit Asian community in South London; at its centre, a genial second-generation loafer (Gordon Warnecke's Omar) drifting away from his alcoholic scold of a father (Roshan Seth) and falling under the influence of his garrulous entrepreneur uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), who entrusts the lad with overseeing the launch and running of his brand new laundrette. While so doing, Omar runs into an old crush, Johnny (a donkey-jacketed, Billy Idol-coiffed Daniel Day Lewis, pre-hyphen, pre-My Left Foot), who's spent the years since the pair last met running with a racist crowd. The director was Stephen Frears, who regards the London of 1985 as a location, a character, and just big enough to embrace all interested parties, even if those parties don't always get along. (It's not just the presence of the National Front; at one point, we get a Saeed Jaffrey-Ram John Holder dust-up.) The result was a film with quite a bit going on at the back and sides of its frames, too big, really, for telly: an opposites-attract romcom, but also a snapshot of the nation as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years, simultaneously booming and struggling. It was political to an extent, but it was mostly about muddle-headed people, and their complicated connection to the streets around them; there's an argument that Kureishi and Frears pre-empted Do the Right Thing by several years, putting Persil in the place of pizzas.
When I first saw My Beautiful Laundrette in my teens, it struck me as an ultra-modern love story; this time, I saw it much more as about the immigrant's tricky relationship with their adopted country, which means it speaks to the Britain of 2025 as much as it would have done to the Britain of 1985. (The laundrette was formerly called Churchill's, and though Omar replaces the sign, that name continues to hang heavy over everything that follows.) Jaffrey describes Britain as "this country which we love and hate"; the wounded Seth tells Omar "this country hates us, and all you can think of is to kiss their arses". This London is contested territory, both an extension and consequence of post-Partition India. The fresh-faced, homo-meets-Omo love story, processing from underpass to none-more-Eighties club to high street bricks-and-mortar, is engaging enough, though certain aspects struck me as sketchy this time round: how these lads met, whether Johnny's sick roommate (and maybe even a cough Day Lewis develops towards the end) is a closeted reference to AIDS, just how deeply Johnny is in with the far right. But the film is deceptively scaled and proves spacious in its generosity; you find yourself shifting its constituent elements around in your mind, like fixtures in a shop, and still alighting on pockets of life and interest. The relationship between the estranged brothers seemed to me more intriguing (and moving) this time, partly because Seth and Jaffrey are by far the most assured of the actors milling around here: one principled but lonely, bedridden and drinking himself into oblivion, the other morally compromised yet upwardly mobile. (Compare and contrast the women in their life.) In its rougher edges, My Beautiful Laundrette preserves the tensions of its moment - tensions that have scarcely dissipated in the intervening years - even if Frears strives to defuse them with a few laughs and smiles, the odd note of tenderness, and a tentative happy ending. It scrubs up nicely.
My Beautiful Laundrette returns to selected cinemas from today.
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