Sir Stephen Frears directs layered, character-centric pictures that adroitly mix comedy and drama (The Lost King, Florence Foster Jenkins, Philomena, High Fidelity, among them).
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was one of Frears' early feature films, after a long run as a television director.
The picture, based on an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, starred a young Daniel Day Lewis as Johnny, a white scally Londoner with a spiky blond dye-job who helps his Pakistani boyfriend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), the son of an alcoholic dissident journalist (Roshan Seth), turn a disaster of a washeteria, a money laundering enterprise owned by his gangster uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), into a respectable business.
Frears and Kureishi used this premise to explore sexual and racial politics in the U.K. during the Thatcher years -- with Johnny and Omar standing in as proxies for British disunity and resentment.
Day-Lewis (who would go on to be a three-time Oscar winner) and Warnecke infuse the picture with life and heat that is pretty chaste compared to 2021 standards.
The road to project completion (and whatever the lovers are trying to create romantically) is hardly smooth -- which I think is an accurate metaphor for England's experience with immigration. But the ending -- while uncertain -- is at least hopeful.
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