My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

image courtesy of sbiff.org

If every movie had a title sequence this good, cinema would be in much better shape.

The film positions itself as a story about the gay experience in Thatcher’s England, but it’s really an immigrant story first and foremost. The movie says it best itself: for Pakistanis in England, you’re “nothing without money.” That line is the engine of everything that follows, and it’s the most honest thing the script has to say.

Unfortunately, it takes its time getting anywhere. The first 40 minutes move at a glacial pace - I genuinely struggled to stay engaged. Things shift once the action settles into the laundrette and Johnny (a baby-faced Daniel Day-Lewis) becomes a real fixture in the story rather than a periphery character. From that point on, the film is far more alive.

The trouble is Omar (Gordon Warnecke), the actual lead, who comes across as a blank slate next to almost everyone orbiting him. He’s surrounded by sharper, stranger, more compelling characters and plotlines - and the movie never quite figures out how to braid them together into something cohesive. It feels less like a tapestry and more like a handful of better short films competing for screen time.

There’s a genuinely interesting conflict buried in here about class and money - specifically, about how you make it, not just how much you have. Omar’s father wants his son to chase education and influence, using Johnny as a route back into that world, rather than run what he dismisses as an “underpants-cleaning” business. It’s a sharp idea that the film raises and then mostly drops.

Then there’s Uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), the man who sets the entire plot moving. He’s rich (allegedly), loud, entitled, openly keeping a mistress, married to a wife who deals in potions and curses that seem to genuinely work, and father to a daughter desperate to escape his house by any exit available - including marrying Omar, or at the very least getting his money.

Omar’s arc - from idealistic and broke to slick and opportunistic - is the strongest throughline the film has, and it’s almost funny that Johnny, the supposed outsider, ends up being the closest thing to a moral compass. But every detour into Tania, Nasser, or Omar’s father (a particularly frustrating waste, since there’s real material there) pulls focus from the more compelling film hiding underneath all the side plots.

It really was a beautiful laundrette, though.

2.5 out of 5 Stars