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
