Brick Lane

Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane is a movie that doesn't sustain much visceral drive despite the potentially fascinating tale at its core, an all-too-rare glimpse into the lives of working-class Southeast Asian emigrants in contemporary London. It’s a polished and mannered effort on the part of a director with clear gifts that joins a tradition of handsome, but not terribly affecting, adaptations of modern British literary sensations, such as Joe Wright’s Oscar-nominated take on Ian McEwan’s Atonement or the BBC’s miniseries of Zadie Smith’s sublime White Teeth.

Monica Ali’s well-regarded debut novel is set in the Bengali sects buried within London’s drab suburb, Brick Lane. In the early 1980's, after the untimely, perhaps suicidal death of her mother, Nazneen (Chatterjee) leaves behind her free-spirited sister and relocates to London. She’s been married off to a fat, educated man Chanu (Satish Kaushik) and quickly enters a life of marital unhappiness, providing him with three children, one of which is lost in childbirth, and plenty of boring sex. Finally 2001 comes; Chanu wants to return his family to their Bengali roots by moving back home, but Nazneen is finding herself increasingly distracted by the charms of tall, twenty-something Karim, (Christopher Simpson), a local kid who helps her around the house before they engage in a torrid affair. Of course, 9/11 comes and goes, causing Karim, a vocal member of a local Muslim activist organization, to grow increasingly radical. Chanu’s moderate political stance and mature sense of his Bengali identity begin to seem more appealing to Nazneen, who, unlike so many classic British literary heroines, doesn’t find political and social awakening in sexual liberation, although she’s able to discover just what she wants--to be left alone.

Gavron, along with her cinematographer Robbie Ryan, strains to create a rich, densely colorful palette in the Bengali sequences, while shooting London’s backwaters in cool blues, yellows, and grays. But in reaching for sensuousness and style, Gavron has forgotten to spin her tale in a way that lifts it above the banal concerns of a made-for-basic-cable weepie and is never able to genuinely win over audience participation in these events. It's clear that Ali has written a thoughtful and timely novel whose dramatization in Gavron’s hands does not resonate of the ways in which British provincialism insidiously affects the lives of its often forgotten immigrants.

                                                              Brandon Harris