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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/26/2007 : 06:28:35
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Brick Lane
I so wanted to like this because it pushes all the humanist buttons and has the potential to bridge gaps between cultures, which the source material of Monica Ali's award-winning novel certainly did.
But a novel has the luxury of verbalizing an internal journey and the film equivalent [apart from overused 1st person narration] is to linger on a character's face suffused and overlaid with images that are meant to evoke long-ago memories. Sarah Gavron's debut feature uses those expressionistic techniques within the context of gritty realism, further linking to the past through the device of letters between main character, 30-something Nazneen and the beloved sister she left behind in Bangladesh to fulfil the terms of an arranged marriage to an East End London businessman.
The film charts Nazneen's reality check over twenty-some years, starting with the backdrop of Thatcher's Britain but concentrating on the present. Having arrived as a teenager, Nazneen's now birthed three children and learned to live with the unrealistic pipedreams and absurd self-importance of her admittedly knowledgable and intelligent husband almost devoid of social skills. Her life has been to serve him unquestioningly.
Unfortunately the film presents Britain's story as more engaging than Nazneen's. Without a dramatization of the evolution of her ideas and how she finds enough strength as a woman and a person to cope with daily life, the story seems far too derivative.
As Nazneen, Tannishtha Chatterjee projects a serene screen presence and is charming. But it's the script that lets her down, because there's an assumption that the most useful way to portray someone whose cultural expectation is to accept, to internalize whatever tragedies and joys life flings at one's feet - is to mirror that passivity onscreen. So we're told she lost her fistborn, a boy, to cot death. We have glimpses of her relationship with her two daughters, the elder we must assume, on the road to the kind of inevitable cultural integration which so threatens her father's life view that his only defense is denial.
Add to this an economic thread that binds together the father's terrible ability to provide for his family, his decline into the world of debt - overseen not by some vicious gangster, but by an inoffensive looking grandma who depends on the ignorance of her clients to extort outrageous interest - and finally Nazneen's quiet solution to take in home-sewing. It's the handsome younger man who delivers the material she fashions into jeans and dresses who provides the means for Nazneen's sexual awakening. It's also a wake-up call to the less corporeal deceptions these people play on themselves.
The man - played by the talented Christopher Simpson, a Greco-Brit often cast as south-east Asian - represents the more radical face of Islam, becoming more and more politicized. But Nazneen becomes exposed to such ideas in such a non-dramatic way that any potential effect is dampened. The storytelling techniques of the book - this happens, then this happens, and then this happens, all punctuated with the inner voice, allows you time to make the connections as Nazneen does over a few decades.
In a novel all this is able to beckon you in because there's room to individualize the characters and to make you share their journey. Ironically Gavron's film builds a wall between you and the characters, it makes false a priori assumptions you will be interested in these people and find points of identification. In the end, the film is both too long and doesn't show you enough.
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Salopian 
"Four ever European"
The European Union
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Posted - 11/26/2007 : 09:30:09
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| I enjoyed it, although it would have been better had the director turned up for the promised Q&A. It indeed wasn't as good as I expected, though, and that's even though I haven't read the book. |
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Brick Lane
