Something of a breakthru in New Indie socially engaged British cinema. (Ironic how artistic antipathy toward Margaret Thatcher Conservatism helped rejuvenate the industry.) But Hanif Kureishi’s script, acclaimed as fresh and politically/sexually charged on release, hasn’t aged well; show-offy apprentice work from cast, director, lenser & especially Kureishi who’s working too hard to be noticed. Gadfly-ing on business vs academia; Paki vs Brit; Gay vs Straight; with crisscrossed love & violence forced into place by the entrepreneurial Saeed Jaffrey, a shady Anglo-Paki Pater Familias who lets his failed intellectual brother’s son take charge of a dilapidated laundrette before the boy (hopefully) heads back to university. As various affairs of the heart & drug deals teeter in the extended family, the nephew (Gordon Warnecke) beautifies his new business with help from former grade-school pal Daniel Day-Lewis, a punk layabout eager to leave his bad ways (and racist gang) behind. All other characters now looking more like political props than people, with Kureishi’s plotting contrived & facile, at times uncomfortably touched with unwarranted magical realism. Much the best part now comes from a complete lack of preamble for an eruption of sexual heat between Warnecke & Day-Lewis, something new at the time (still new, come to think of it) and holding up better than anything else in here. With director Stephen Frears, elsewise a bit too florid in this his second feature film, making sure these two are by far the most attractive people on screen. In the movies, attractiveness attracts.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: What really put Daniel Day-Lewis on the map was the combination of this film’s punk hunk (his natural height accentuated with a dyed blond crop-top) in theaters the same time his foppish, buttoned-down period suitor in A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85 was also in release.
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