My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection
on September 16th, 2015 at 17:15
This excellent British film offers a grim portrait of societal disintegration during the 1980s in Great Britain, a country rife with racial tensions and a thriving underground economy. Stephen Frears was at the forefront of the British cinematic revival of the mid-1980s, and the delightfully transgressive My Beautiful Laundrette is his greatest triumph of the period.
Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a Pakistani teenager living in London, gets along doing odd jobs for his uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey, The Man Who Would Be King). Nasser's a successful, if shady, businessman while Omar's father (Roshan Seth, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) is a once-famous journalist, a self-pitying socialist who knocks back vodka and rarely leaves his bed. The two brothers have very different views of the land of opportunity that is England, as well as their familial and cultural connections to their homeland, and Omar looks to each as an example as he tries to find his own way in a country where he is both native and foreigner. Omar convinces his uncle to allow him to manage a rundown laundrette. By swindling his drug dealing uncle Salim, and with the help of his street-wise English friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis, Gangs of New York), Omar is able to raise money to renovate the laundrette and turn it into a profitable business. And in the process, Omar and Johnny fall in love.
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