Old Yorker

  • My Beautiful Laundrette

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1985)

    It wasn’t the first ‘British Asian’ film:  Peter K Smith’s A Private Enterprise (1974), in which an Indian immigrant tries to start his own business in Birmingham, made it to British cinema screens a decade earlier.  But My Beautiful Laundrette’s recognition on both sides of the Atlantic was new for a story told chiefly from a British-Asian perspective.  That story – set in South London in the heyday of Thatcher’s Britain, with the racism of young National Front types, working-class but unemployed, much in evidence – gives Stephen Frears’ film historical specificity yet it still resonates forty years on.  My Beautiful Laundrette is very entertaining into the bargain.

    Frears had made his first cinema feature, Gumshoe, back in 1971 but the next one, The Hit, didn’t appear until 1984.  In the meantime, he’d become a reliably successful director of TV drama, especially Alan Bennett pieces, and My Beautiful Laundrette, which runs a little over ninety minutes, was conceived and made for television.  (Four or five definite pauses in the action show at what points the commercial breaks would have come.)  The film was so enthusiastically received at an Edinburgh Festival screening that the production companies involved – Film 4 and Working Title – thought again.  An unexpected release in cinemas soon followed.

    Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay draws on his own family background and upbringing to dramatise various oppositions.  The central character is Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke), a British Pakistani in his early twenties, the only child of first-generation immigrants to Britain.  Omar’s widowed father Hussein (Roshan Seth), once an eminent left-wing journalist in Pakistan (he was close to Zulfikar Ai Bhutto), now spends most of his time in bed with a bottle of vodka for company.  His wife’s recent suicide has deepened Hussein’s disillusion but he still believes in education enough to want Omar, his de facto carer, to go to college.  Hussein’s brother, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), a successful local businessman, has other ideas.  Nasser has any number of irons in the fire.  He’s a car dealer, a shop owner, a slum landlord.  His right-hand man, Salim (Derrick Branche), has sidelines in drugs trafficking and porn videos.  Omar works briefly as a car washer in one of Nasser’s garages before getting a different detergent assignment.  He starts looking after another of his uncle’s properties, a dilapidated laundrette.

    Omar is also part-time chauffeur to Salim and his wife Cherry (Souad Faress).  Their drive home one night is interrupted by a gaggle of white racist lowlifes, among them Johnny Burfoot (Daniel Day-Lewis), Omar’s schoolfriend, with whom he’s lost touch since Johnny drifted into the NF, petty crime and vagrancy.  (He’s first seen in the film moving hurriedly out of one squat, in search of the next.)  Johnny accepts Omar’s invitation to help him renovate the laundrette:  they manage to complete the refurb by selling one of Salim’s narcotics deliveries and pocketing the cash.  The place is relaunched as ‘Powders’, with splashy décor and signage – as laundrettes go, it’s comically chic.  Omar’s involvement of Johnny in the project is a matter of romantic as much as business enterprise.  In the minutes before Powders’ grand opening (complete with ribbon-cutting), the two young men are making love on the premises, in a back room.

    Omar and Johnny are invisible to locals queuing in the street outside but the same can’t be said for Nasser and his white mistress, Rachel (Shirley Anne Field), who, to the queue’s amusement, are dancing to the Skaters’ Waltz beside the washing machines.  This almost whimsical moment, one of several in the film, is part of what makes My Beautiful Laundrette so distinctive; the Skaters’ Waltz is part of Powders’ eclectic muzak; and Rachel is a key part of Nasser’s conflicting drives.  A prominent member of the Pakistani community, he’s ethnically traditional enough to try to arrange his daughters’ marriages – and sees his nephew as a future husband for the eldest, independent-minded Tania (Rita Wolf).  But Nasser is also an enthusiastic Thatcherite and Rachel is an expression of his determination to flourish ‘in this damn country, which we hate and love’.

    Rachel’s eventual departure from Nasser’s life is ironically apt.  His more simply traditional wife, Bilquis (Charu Bala Choksi), embittered by his adultery, cooks up potions and pronounces a ritual curse on Rachel, whose white skin develops a nasty rash.  Rachel, to Nasser’s dismay, decides it’s best if he and she part company.  Tania also finally disappears from the film, literally but ambiguously.  Hussein and Omar’s home looks out on a railway line, perhaps the same one where, we’re told, Omar’s mother ended her life.   Tania, who strongly disapproves both of Rachel and of having her own future arranged by her father, especially with a cousin who prefers boys, stands on the railway platform with her suitcase.  Nasser, on Hussein’s balcony, catches sight of his daughter and yells at her to come back.  A passing train obscures her from view.  It doesn’t stop at the station but, once the train has passed, Tania is no longer on the platform.

    Before My Beautiful Laundrette, Hanif Kureishi had written exclusively for the theatre.  Although the chalk-and-cheese outlooks of Hussein and Nasser might suggest stage dialectic, Kureishi’s first screenplay marks an impressively smooth transition to another writing medium.  Some of the little verbal touches are very effective.  The key location, before its makeover as Powders, is ‘Churchill’s Laudrette’, a symbol of tired old post-war England.  Even better is Omar’s pet name within the family:  ‘Omo’ is more than a prophesy of his future in laundrette management …  That said, the script doesn’t really explore the implications of Omar’s and Johnny’s sexuality.  This feels like an omission, particularly in Johnny’s case, given the political company he’s been keeping.  Kureishi’s writing is less fluent for a character like Rachel, who may not derive from autobiographical experience:  when Tania angrily accuses of Rachel of parasitism, the older woman’s supposedly poignant response isn’t really in her own voice (‘We’re of different generations, and different classes.  Everything is waiting for you. The only thing that has ever waited for me is your father’).  References to current British politics are cleverly sprinkled on the script, though.  The competing cultural allegiances that Omar’s father and uncle represent – to native land vs adopted country, to education vs moneymaking as means of acceptance in a new culture – aren’t repeatedly asserted in words but strongly in evidence in the storyline throughout.

    Watching My Beautiful Laundrette again (I’d seen it once before, decades ago), I wondered if Kureishi might have also drawn inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), whose protagonists are another pair of closely-bound young men – one straitened by conflicting cultural expectations, the other a charismatic wild child called Johnny (at one point in Laundrette, Johnny is referred to as ‘Johnny boy’).  Stephen Frears’ version of rough London is, however, very different from, and usually less dangerous than, Scorsese’s New York.  Frears’ lighter touch gives his film humour though it can also be a bit evasive.  The narrative is punctuated occasionally by an animated washing-machine door, spinning to the accompaniment of a glug-glug sound, and it raises a smile each time.  On the other hand, the white yobs are one-note characters (crudely played by Richard Graham and others).  Malign as they are, these kids are somehow redolent of the sketched-in lower orders in an Ealing comedy.  As a result, the real, bloody violence of Frears’ climax is startling chiefly because it’s incongruous.

    Yet I prefer My Beautiful Laundrette to Mean Streets and its combination – sometimes an awkward mismatch – of elements contributes strongly to its engaging quality.  Kureishi’s most satisfying characters are Nasser and Hussein, and the senior actors playing them give the film’s most satisfying performances.  It’s worth waiting for the one scene in which Roshan Seth’s Hussein, with his melancholy wit and beautiful spoken English, and Saeed Jaffrey’s rackety, dynamic, barbarian Nasser have the screen to themselves.  The major younger characters are a trickier matter.  The casting of these roles is fascinating in long retrospect because of the gulf, in terms of what they went on to achieve, between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.  The latter, nice-looking in a soft-featured way, seems physically right for Omar but you know from an early stage that you’re watching an actor more willing than able.  His woodenness, though, serves to reinforce his character’s charming naïveté, so that it’s hard to say that he gives a less effective performance than Day-Lewis, even though Warnecke’s playing is incomparably less skilful.

    Day-Lewis stands out here but not always in the right way.  As in other pre-My Left Foot (1989) appearances of his (A Room with a View (1986), for example), you sense the presence of an extraordinary actor without being convinced that his characterisation is working.  As Johnny, Day-Lewis does amazing things – especially physically, including an unexpected, effortless vault over a washing machine.  His Cockney accent is less consistent:  it sometimes sounds just right, sometimes less than fully absorbed.  And Day-Lewis’s Johnny doesn’t look as if he could ever have been part of the National Front contingent.  Given the film’s place in British cinema history, though, it’s just as well that you come out of it more impressed by the non-Caucasians in the story.  Another interesting aspect of My Beautiful Laundrette’s timing is that it followed hot on the heels of high-profile last-days-of-the-Raj dramas, on the big screen and the small.  Some of Frears’ main Asian actors were instantly recognisable.  Saeed Jaffrey had appeared in all three of Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Roshan Seth in the first two, Derrick Branche in the third.  It’s fascinating to see this trio situated in such a different time and place.

    12 August 2025

     

  • Sinners

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Coogler (2025)

    In Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele’s use of a horror-movie framework to dramatise African-American victimisation and exploitation felt original and exciting.  Peele’s repetition of the formula in Us (2019) and Nope (2022) was increasingly unsatisfying.  He hasn’t yet directed another feature; in the meantime, another Black writer-director, Ryan Coogler, has taken over where Peele left off.  Nope worked science-fiction and Western elements into the mix; Sinners, although predominantly vampire horror, is being acclaimed as a ‘genre mash’, thanks to its period setting – the early 1930s – and time-hopping musical aspects.  The three Peele pictures also paid diminishing returns in terms of box-office receipts, but all made money and Sinners, released in April this year, has fared well commercially, too:  Wikipedia currently shows total receipts of $366m against a $90-100m budget.  Whereas Peele’s Nope, although widely admired by critics, didn’t equal the >90% fresh rating of its two predecessors on Rotten Tomatoes, Sinners’ fresh rating is right up there with Get Out’s:  at the time of writing, Coogler’s film has 405 reviews and 97% are positive.  I liked Coogler’s debut feature, Fruitvale Station (2013), and he did a decent job on the formulaic Creed (2015).  I avoided his next two pictures, Black Panther (2018) and its sequel Wakanda Forever (2022), on the grounds that a Black Marvel superhero was liable to be as boring as any other kind.  But I maybe would have enjoyed Coogler’s Black Panther films more than I enjoyed his latest.  Sinners makes for turgid viewing; that it’s also sometimes baffling doesn’t make it any less turgid.

    Michael B Jordan, who has appeared in all of Coogler’s features, stars in Sinners as identical twins Elijah and Elias Moore, known respectively as Smoke and Stack.  They fought in World War I and spent the 1920s working in organised crime in Chicago.  Now it’s 1932 and the Moore brothers return to their home town of Clarksdale, Mississippi with the aim of opening a ‘juke joint’.  Sluggish as the first half of Coogler’s narrative is, Smoke and Stack accomplish their objective remarkably quickly.  After a short prologue, Sinners mostly comprises events ‘One day earlier’, and through the night that follows.  On arrival in Clarksdale, the twins, with money they stole from Chicago gangsters, buy a disused sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who also happens to be the local Ku Klux Klan leader.  The very same evening, the juke joint opens.  The performers there include the Moores’ cousin, seventeen-year-old Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper who dreams of a career as a blues musician, despite the stern injunctions of his pastor father (Saul Williams) that blues are the devil’s music; Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a veteran harmonica player and pianist with a drink problem; and singer Pearline (Jayme Williams), with whom Sammie is instantly smitten although she’s married.  The Chinese-American husband and wife Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who run a local store, supply the joint’s food and drink and run the bar there, with the help of Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).  Cornbread (Omar Miller), another sharecropper, is on bouncer duty.  The clientele includes Stack’s ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), even though she’s only just buried her mother – the woman who cared for the orphaned Moore twins when they were young but who, as Mary angrily complains to Stack, they lately ignored.

    The timeframe and vampire drama of Sinners, as well as the moral hierarchy of its characters, seem to be inspired by the cult horror-action movie From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), directed by Robert Rodriguez but written by, co-starring and influenced by Quentin Tarantino.  From Dusk Till Dawn also features criminal siblings, a bank robber (George Clooney) and his psycho brother (Tarantino), who, like Smoke and Stack, seem nasty pieces of work until they come up against the vampires.  I don’t recall who survives, who dies and who persists as one of the undead in From Dusk Till Dawn but it seemed to be over much more quickly than Sinners – even though there’s not a vast difference in their running times (108 vs 137 minutes).  Two main factors slow up and weigh down Coogler’s film.  First, the characters at the juke joint, with the qualified exception of Annie, are irritatingly slow on the uptake that there are vampires in their midst.  (Whenever someone ventures outside the building, they’ll almost certainly have been ‘turned’ by the time they set foot back inside.)  Second, the twins’ backstory and various other dramatis personae inflate it with racial history ‘significance’, although this viewer struggled to make sense of what that adds up to.

    The character who apparently kicks off the vampire contagion is Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish immigrant first seen taking shelter with a Klansman (Peter Dreimanis), who’s Hogwood’s nephew, and his wife (Lola Kirke).  Remmick, who is being pursued by a Choctaw vampire hunter (Nathaniel Arcand), turns the KKK couple into vampires before the three of them fetch up outside the juke joint.  In the meantime, they’ve sung and danced to the folk tune ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’.  (Part of Remmick’s Celtic musical heritage, yes, but did his bites transmit that heritage to the Klan pair?)  Remmick offers Smoke and Stack, in exchange for entry to their joint, money plus musical entertainment.  Although suspicious Smoke turns them away, he and Stack almost immediately realise they need cash so Mary exits to negotiate with Remmick on the twins’ behalf.  (Why, though, when she’s so pissed off with Stack?)  When she returns, now a vampire herself, Mary seduces Stack and, once they’re in bed together, bites him fatally.  Cornbread, who temporarily deserts his post to go for a pee, is next on Remmick’s list; others follow.  By this stage, Sinners would be turning into quite a familiar horror movie if not for the growing band of vampires’ striking ethnic heterogeneity – African Americans, mixed-race Mary (she ‘passes’ as white), Chinese Americans, Irish, redneck white supremacists …  (This calls to mind ‘the Tethered’, a feature of Us that I couldn’t fathom:  while their name connoted slavery, their make-up was multi-ethnic.)

    Remmick tries but fails to tempt those not yet turned to join the vampire company, claiming it’s a passport to freedom from persecution.  Ostensibly chief villain of the piece, he’s surely not to be believed yet vampirism in Sinners does appear to transcend ethnic difference, enough at least for Klansmen in earthly life to be unworried by being members of the same undead community as Blacks.  There follows an interminable battle in the juke joint between the human survivors and the vampires, in which nearly all the former are killed except Smoke and Sammie, who make it through to the sunrise that incinerates all the vampires but Mary, who has escaped, and, though this isn’t revealed until much later, Stack.  As in the film’s prologue, Sammie, guitar in hand, stumbles into his father’s Sunday morning church service, while Smoke confronts Hogwood and numerous Klan sidekicks.  He spectacularly shoots them all dead – Tarantino/Django-style, except that Smoke also takes a bullet and dies from the wound.  Sammie, still ignoring his father’s pleas to renounce sin-aka-blues-music, heads off to Chicago to make his fortune.

    In an epilogue that begins midway through the film’s closing credits, Coogler fast-forwards to 1992.  Sammie (Buddy Guy), now an elderly and revered blues musician and owner of a Chicago blues club, is visited there by undead Stack and Mary, wearing 1990s clothes and hairdos.  Mary doesn’t speak a word; Stack might as well not have, for all I understood what he said.  This finale does, though, serve to confirm the centrality of music in Sinners.  The film begins with animated images on the screen and a voiceover, which, more than anything that follows, makes a connection between cultural groups all of which will figure in the vampire army:

    ‘There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.  In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí.  In Choctaw land, they called them Firekeepers.  And in West Africa, they’re called Griots.  This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.’

    Sammie emerges as his community’s conjuror.  He and his blues singing draw ‘spirits from the past and future’ to the juke joint:  an around-the-world-across-the-years musical montage features Chinese opera, Bollywood dancing, Alvin Ailey ballet, mariachi players and hip-hop.  Sammie ‘also attracts evil’, in the form of Remmick.  When he announces that Sammie is the prize he’s really after at the juke joint, Remmick seems to mean two things.  He hints at the appropriation of the blues by white popular culture (‘I want your stories and your songs’).  By saying that he means to use Sammie’s skills to summon the spirits of his own ‘lost’ community, Remmick also seems to assert Irish victimhood, and suggest what impelled the Irish exodus to America.

    Miles Caton, already well known in the US as a musician, does well in his acting debut.  For me, though, Caton’s speaking voice – surprisingly deep and thus a kind of counterpoint to teenage Sammie’s naivete – was more remarkable than his singing, musical as that is.  Michael B Jordan’s CGI-enabled dual performance is disappointing.  Smoke wears a blue cap and Stack a red fedora (I think that’s the right way round):  once circumstances remove the headgear, Jordan’s characterisations become even less distinct.  He shows his acting quality chiefly in his scenes with Hailee Steinfeld and, especially, Wunmi Mosaku.  It’s not a strong competition but Mosaku’s Annie is the film’s most arresting and persuasive character.  Annie is deeply invested in Hoodoo lore and practices (she’s the opening voiceover).  She talks of ‘mojo bags’ and ‘haints’ (ghosts or spirits), believes her Hoodoo observances protected Smoke and his brother on the field of battle and in the criminal underworld, though Smoke points out they weren’t enough to prevent the death of the couple’s infant daughter (which seems to have caused the rift between him and Annie).  Like Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo is a naturally imposing presence; unlike Mosaku, Lindo tends to assert his authority on screen, so that he seems to be overacting, though that’s less of a problem here than it was in his larger role in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020).  Even as a vampiric wrong ‘un, Jack O’Connell is more humanly alive than most other members of the Sinners cast.

    Ryan Coogler’s film, in conjunction with the largely enthusiastic reception of it, depresses me.  The film is pretentious yet simple-minded.  It’s essentially a vampire movie that lacks the dramatic energy traditionally associated with the genre.  The confused ethnic elements make it heavy going; the musical ones don’t supply much of a lift because they, too, seem to be making a point.  At the same time, Coogler isn’t above primitive sentimentality – a (reprised) shot of the grave of Smoke and Annie’s child, for example.  Much of the press reaction to the film strikes me as disingenuous though it’s also understandable.   In today’s richly grim political climate, the racial history dimension of Sinners largely disarms liberal-minded criticism.  It seems that it’s no longer possible to sympathise with the thinking behind a piece of cinema and still be honest enough to admit to defects in the finished product.

    5 August 2025

     

Posts navigation