My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Directed by Stephen Frears. Starring Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Saeed Jaffrey, Derrick Branche, Roshan Seth, Rita Wolf, Souad Faress, Shirley Ann Field, Richard Graham, Stephen Marcus. [R]

London-set story exploring English-Pakistani relations and economic strife during the Thatcher years. The nephew (Warnecke) of an immigrant entrepreneur is given control of a run-down laundrette, tasked with making it a profitable enterprise, which he does with the help of young English punk Day-Lewis, who knew Warnecke from their school days and becomes his lover. Genuine and sensitive treatment of satirical and inflammatory elements (romantic complications involving uncle Jaffrey, his wife, and his lover even border on sad farce); beautifully performed in ways that don’t rub raw the emotional clichés of the script, particularly Day-Lewis’ tenderly susceptible street-trash lad and Seth as Warnecke’s deteriorated alcoholic father. Slips in some unneeded baggage that interrupts the intimacy of its central saga of outsiders-cut-from-different-cloth, such as a drug-smuggling sub-plot, but it’s primarily a warm and rewarding experience where the comfort of hope is shown capable of surviving crisis and isolation. Frears’ directorial instincts are largely on point…but those bubbling sound effects are distractingly chintzy. Scripted by Hanif Kureishi, who makes a brief appearance at a dinner party.

76/100