My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

This was always my favourite of the early slew of films commissioned by Channel Four. At the time it was trendy to make sure that every film was “edgy” and determined to make some sort of social point about the supposed iniquities of “Thatcherism”. This one is a bit more subtle about that, presenting an hybrid of a love story married with a critique on a racially charged environment in which the thuggish and the venal were almost equally complicit. We meet the handsome young “Omar” (Gordon Warnecke) who has been affectionately looking after his dipso dad (Roshan Seth) for a while until he gets a job working for his wealthy uncle “Nasser” (Saeed Jeffrey). Now this man is perhaps an epitome of the successful,  conservative voting, “entrepreneur”. He lives a life of the traditional family man at home whilst keeping his long-term mistress “Rachel” (Shirley Anne Field) in fur coats. “Omar” has some of that ambition, too, and so convinces “Nasser” to let him renovate a dilapidated old launderette he owns. Meantime, with everyone desperate to stitch him up with a pretty girl, he has a bit of a thing with local wide boy “Johnny” (Daniel Day-Lewis) who looks like he’s come straight out of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners video! Of course, they have to be fairly clandestine about their relationship especially as this latter fellow has a reputation for hanging about with some National Front-types whose racist tendencies he just about manages to keep away from his friend. That becomes harder when he takes a job working for “Omar” and the rundown shop starts to look like something you’d see on an holiday resort pier. With pressure growing on both men to conform to more established societal expectations, decisions are having to be made that, curiously enough, don’t really involve their sexuality at all - but to what end? I think this has to be DDL at his most sexy, alluring and mischievous and there’s a fun chemistry between the two men steeped in traditions that neither found validating or relevant. It’s that process of characterful evolution that Stephen Frears employs well here to showcase the bigotry prevailing amidst a society as yet uninterested in toleration or integration, but it’s the way that it doesn’t single out one attitude as morally superior that worked for me. Both are, in their own ways, as bad as each other - and the really engaging effort from Jaffrey encapsulates that as he flaunts his wants his cake and eat it approach to both his family and his life. It has lost a little of it’s sting now, but it’s still quite a wittily written and executed exposé of an English urban life riddled with hypocrisies, double-standards and aspiration.