My Beautiful Laundrette **** (1985, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke, Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Shirley Anne Field) – Classic Movie Review 461

Director Stephen Frears’s 1985 heart-warmer raises the spirits. It stars future double-Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, who first captured the attention on screen here as Johnny, a gay, reformed racist punk. The Beautiful Laundrette of the title is in Battersea, south London, which Johnny starts up with his love-struck gay Asian mate, Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke), whom he wittily and oppressively calls Omo.

By one of those odd chances, this film and A Room with a View both opened on the same day in in New York. With Day-Lewis in prominent, very different roles, the American critics declared a star was born that day. It turned out they were right.

Writer Hanif Kureishi’s marvellously alive and aware original screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette is gritty, realistic and Thatcher-era bashing. But, conversely, the love story at its heart plays like a sweet fantasy, and in the harsh south London setting of the mid-Eighties it feels like it is imbued with more of an air of wish-fulfilment than reality. But, if the love story is a fantasy, it is a beautiful, moving one.

And Kureishi’s progressive-minded script admirably treats both Asians and gays with a respect rare in the cinema, both then and now. It makes its points strongly and clearly, but it subtle with it at the same time. There’s no sledgehammer touch here with the political or personal messages. He’s created a bunch of truly memorable characters, steering way clear of any caricatures or stereotypes this story could easily have led to.

Day-Lewis and Warnecke are absolutely excellent, with the former creating a character that’s miles away from his repressed, snobbish Edwardian upper-class man in A Room with a View or his Oscar-winning Christie Brown in My Left Foot. But Warnecke’s great too, bringing a lovely warmth, appeal and nobility to his gay character. How unfair then that Warnecke’s career didn’t have the impetus of Day-Lewis’s! Saeed Jaffrey and Roshan Seth as Warnecke’s family members and Shirley Anne Field as Jaffrey’s sad lover provide immaculate backup.

It’s the heyday of the Thatcher era, and most of the Pakistani Hussein family has settled in London, looking to share in the wealth the Tories have promised. Nasser (Jaffrey) and his family live a comfortable lifestyle but his brother, alcoholic Ali (Seth), once a famous journalist in Pakistan, lives in a seedy flat with his son, Omar. Omar talks Nasser into letting him manage his rundown laundrette and employs his old friend, the working-class gay ex-skinhead Johnny, who’s hanging out with a gang of white punks.

Kureishi is to be congratulated on the warm and understanding, socially and sexually aware screenplay, and Frears is to be congratulated too for making such a brilliantly sympathetic job of the direction. The film unit take painstaking trouble to go out and about to capture the flavour of the run-down working-class locations of the day. It pays off big time. Frears’s movie gets a lot of top valuable mileage out of the then untrendy Battersea, Wandsworth, Lambeth and Stockwell locations.

It was the winner of the London Evening Standard film of the year award, but otherwise it went largely unnoticed. Surprisingly there were no Bafta awards. Kureishi’s original screenplay was honoured with an Oscar nomination.

Low Gear at 11 Wilcox Road, South Lambeth, stands in as Powders Laundrette. Papa’s flat is 245 Queenstown Road, Battersea.

Frears went on to direct Prick Up Your Ears in 1987.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 461

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Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).