Comedy

Drama

Romance

My Beautiful Laundrette

Working Title Films

SAF Productions

Channel Four Films

United Kingdom

English

اردو

Gordon Warnecke

Daniel Day-Lewis

Roshan Seth

Saeed Jaffrey

Derrick Branche

Rita Wolf

Souad Faress

Shirley Anne Field

Richard Graham

Garry Cooper

Charu Bala Chokshi

Persis Maravala

Nisha Kapur

Walter Donohue

Neil Cunningham

Gurdial Sira

Stephen Marcus

Ram John Holder

Dawn Archibald

Jonathan Moore

Gerard Horan

Bhasker Patel

Badi Uzzaman

Ayub Khan-Din

Dulice Liecier

Chris Pitt

Kerryann White

Colin Campbell

Sheila Chitnis

Winston Graham

Dudley Thomas

Oliver Stapleton

Hanif Kureishi

Sarah Radclyffe

Stephen Frears

Tim Bevan

Mick Audsley

Elaine Carew

Jim Dowdall

Debbie McWilliams

Lindy Hemming

Nosher Powell

Wendy Rawson

Bill Weston

Ray Perry Sr.

Mike Laye

Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski

Rocky Taylor

Hans Zimmer

Stanley Myers

Jane Frazer

Rebecca O'Brien

Albert Bailey

Malcolm Davies

Penny Eyles

Alison Dominitz

St. Clair Davis

CinemaSerf

This was always my favourite of the early slew of films commissioned by Channel Four. At the time it was trendy to make sure that every film was “edgy” and determined to make some sort of social point about the supposed iniquities of “Thatcherism”. This one is a bit more subtle about that, presenting an hybrid of a love story married with a critique on a racially charged environment in which the thuggish and the venal were almost equally complicit. We meet the handsome young “Omar” (Gordon Warnecke) who has been affectionately looking after his dipso dad (Roshan Seth) for a while until he gets a job working for his wealthy uncle “Nasser” (Saeed Jeffrey). Now this man is perhaps an epitome of the successful,  conservative voting, “entrepreneur”. He lives a life of the traditional family man at home whilst keeping his long-term mistress “Rachel” (Shirley Anne Field) in fur coats. “Omar” has some of that ambition, too, and so convinces “Nasser” to let him renovate a dilapidated old launderette he owns. Meantime, with everyone desperate to stitch him up with a pretty girl, he has a bit of a thing with local wide boy “Johnny” (Daniel Day-Lewis) who looks like he’s come straight out of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners video! Of course, they have to be fairly clandestine about their relationship especially as this latter fellow has a reputation for hanging about with some National Front-types whose racist tendencies he just about manages to keep away from his friend. That becomes harder when he takes a job working for “Omar” and the rundown shop starts to look like something you’d see on an holiday resort pier. With pressure growing on both men to conform to more established societal expectations, decisions are having to be made that, curiously enough, don’t really involve their sexuality at all - but to what end?  I think this has to be DDL at his most sexy, alluring and mischievous and there’s a fun chemistry between the two men steeped in traditions that neither found validating or relevant. It’s that process of characterful evolution that Stephen Frears employs well here to showcase the bigotry prevailing amidst a society as yet uninterested in toleration or integration, but it’s the way that it doesn’t single out one attitude as morally superior that worked for me. Both are, in their own ways, as bad as each other - and the really engaging effort from Jaffrey encapsulates that as he flaunts his wants his cake and eat it approach to both his family and his life. It has lost a little of it’s sting now, but it’s still quite a wittily written and executed exposé of an English urban life riddled with hypocrisies, double-standards and aspiration.  

40th Anniversary | Official Trailer

Cinemoments: My Beautiful Laundrette

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My Beautiful Laundrette

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Cast

Gordon Warnecke

Daniel Day-Lewis

Roshan Seth

Saeed Jaffrey

Derrick Branche

Rita Wolf

Souad Faress

Shirley Anne Field

Richard Graham

Garry Cooper

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