Sarah Gavron: Brick Lane (2007)

SARAH GAVRON: BRICK LANE (2007)

Fizzling relationships in London's Bangladeshi community

Review by Chris Knipp

Sarah Gavron's movie brings Monica Ali's popular novel about Bangladeshis in London to the screen, which bears comparison with Mira Nair's recent screened novel of an Indian family in America, The Namesake. Less fun, more limited in focus, Brick Lane nonetheless adds interesting new notes with its emphasis on the young arranged bride. Nazneen Ahmed (lovely, slightly mysterious Tannishtha Chatterjee) is seventeen when married off to Chanu Ahmed (the interesting Satish Kaushik). He is not only older, fat, and unattractive, but a rather silly man. He pretends to be an intellectual like Ashoke (Irfan Khan) of The Namesake, but if he is, he can't parlay his love of Proust and David Hume into a good job. Eventually he becomes a bus driver, but not before he has gotten embroiled with a woman usurer in the community to buy a computer. Meanwhile Nazneen starts sewing to make money, and the young Bangladeshi man who runs the factory, Karim (Christopher Simpson), has an affair with her.

2001 comes and Karim quickly turns militant and Islamic, while Chanu Ahmed comes through as more complex than we might have realized. He's a suffering mensch, a man who just can't fit in, and therefore also someone who doesn't flow with the prejudices or confusions of the crowd; and hence it's he who makes a strong little speech deflating the local Bangladeshis' claim to Islam historically as something that necessarily unites them. Of course Chanu Ahmed is also out of touch with his wife and their two girls (they've been in London for twenty years now, though the time is a little too vaguely telescoped). When the husband/father gets ready to return to Bangladesh after two decades, wife and daughters simply refuse to go. To save face he announces that he's decided they will follow later. Chanu Ahmed tells his wife he simply cannot stay, and she replies that England is her home now--as her young lover Karim told her earlier. But she has told Karim that she doesn't want to marry him.

The dialogue is on this simple level. What's subtle in Brick Lane is the way changes in characters slowly unfold over time. But though Nazneed is elegant and enigmatic and Chanu Ahmed acquires an appeal that is far more than skin deep, characters lack depth due to the not-so-interesting lines they're provided with. Family saga though this may be, it fails to pass the torch on to the children as The Namesake does, and all the realtionships just seem to fizzle out. There's no clear hint of how they will end up.

If one thinks of the brilliant mid-Eighties Stephen Frears-Hanif Kureishi collaboration about Pakistanis in London My Beautiful Laundrette, with its novelistically complex characters and situations, one realizes that despite the soulfulness of Brick Road's heroine and the surprising complexity of her unattractive mate--and the droll humor and multi-generational scope of The Namesake--neither of these films condensing novels has writing as fine and original and rich as Kureishi's.

The wife of Brick Lane is a lovely woman, but her correspondence relationship with her sister back home seems an unfortunate casualty of the screen adaptation--it's never quite clear what all the flashbacks to their shared childhood are meant to mean in adult terms or why that relationship too, like the others, fizzles out. The interest of this new film remains its focus on the obvious possiblity that though an arranged marriage may lead to propagation, it may never move on to understanding, and that an old man may remain unattractive. The husband goes home only because all his opetions have died. But that is a real outcome we don't often get to see.

Seen in London November 21, 2007. U.S. release as yet unscheduled.