MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (64)

Directed by: Stephen Frears (1985)

Starring: Gordon Warnecke, Saeed Jaffrey, Daniel Day-Lewis

The Pitch: Thatcherite England, the home of free enterprise : a young Pakistani refurbishes a run-down laundrette with his old friend (and lover), a neo-Nazi thug.

Theo Sez: Second viewing, 13 years on, for a film I'd almost forgotten : it's a kind of mid-80s TRAINSPOTTING, in tone if not in content (or politics) - emphasising energy and fearless abandon, setting itself determinedly apart from the frilly-frocks British Tradition of Quality. Frears, no doubt aiming to disguise its TV-movie origins, directs like a man possessed, cutting out the middles of scenes (taking us straight from Omar being mistaken for an interloper to being hugged by his uncle, leaving out the boring exposition as the misunderstanding is cleared up), cross-cutting for the sake of it, juggling characters, flitting from strand to strand, and setting the whole thing amid a riot of colours (even the washing-machines in the laundrette are decked out in pastels) with cheerful bubbling-water sound effects plopping away on the soundtrack. It works for a while then starts to seem a bit contrived, just as the bracingly honest portrait of Pakistani immigrants ("in-betweens", picking up their adopted country's bad habits in an effort to assimilate) is scuppered by writer Kureishi's ideological bias against what he sees as Thatcherite rapaciousness, determined to 'punish' the uncle for putting money above everything (or is it just for trying to have it all ways?). A certain confusion is never quite resolved - is the laundrette supposed to represent greed or enterprise, a divisive or unifying influence? Warnecke overdoes the bumptiousness, but Day-Lewis gives the first of his great performances, combining wiry menace with a blameless sweetness ; it's in the body-language, tiny things like his subtle, weary tensing before wading into a fight (exactly like a labourer before lifting a heavy load) - there's no malice in it, quite the reverse : violence has become over-familiar, almost a chore, to this character. Too bad the part isn't up to the performance.