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Yet it did. Many, like entrepreneur Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), bit deeply into the golden fruit and built themselves an empire. With a roving eye for cars, laundrettes and who knows what else, Nasser can afford a family, a mistress and a measure of philanthropy. He cares that his brother (Roshan Seth), once a brilliant writer, has slipped into self-decay, that his nephew Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is going to waste. In the spirit of family, Nasser and his partner Salim (Derrick Branche) employ Omar to wash their cars. He's a quick study. Sensing opportunity, Omar convinces his uncle that he should be the man who runs one of Nasser's most dilapidated washhouses. It's in a terrible state but, with the aid of old friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), Omar has hope.
What amazes is that in this seemingly simple relationship, My Beautiful Laundrette digs out and takes on an exhausting number of cultural taboos. Hanif Kureishi, the tale's perceptive and over-ambitious creator, seems determined to cover substantial ground, almost as if this was his one and only chance. For starters, Omar is Asian and Johnny is Anglo-Saxon. Simple stuff except that Johnny hangs out with low-grade BNP thugs, racists without the wit to grasp the slogans they spout. Oh, then there's the hidden twist, Omar and Johnny's forbidden love; no wonder both can flirt with Nasser's feisty daughter Tania (Rita Wolf) without fear. On and on it goes. Kureishi delving into the generational chasm that separates young and old, a mutual misunderstanding, peering into the conflict of Class.
Mostly these shotgun tactics pay off for the audience, if you can keep up with the snapping pace with which Frears leaps between threads. Characters have a tendency to swim in and out of focus, letting go with a few lines then fading away until a later scene. So, when Omar and Johnny finally make their way to the front, we've got a little background and enough context to make sense of the fragmentation. Somehow their relationship is convincing and quite unreal, held in place by individual ability; Warnecke juggles friends and enemies deftly, Day-Lewis evinces the attitude and accent of common, downtrodden man. Around them the multi-cultural cast ebbs and flows, mostly convincing and always interesting. My Beautiful Laundrette rewardingly looks over their shoulders; no beginning and no end, just a span of time.
On the technical side of things, My Beautiful Laundrette is clearly the product of television funding. Not necessarily a bad point, it simply means that Frears must confine his visual scope and put up with a selection of dodgy sets; it also explains why Oliver Stapleton, the cinematographer, sticks mainly to tight framing and close-ups. Fortunately, like so many other low budget pictures, this film lives and dies by the quality of its script. Kureishi manages, audaciously, to dig out the comedy that is inherent in his characters and weave this seamlessly between the many serious threads. It's an impressive display of literary ability, boosted by the general strength of the cast.
At the time of its release I'd guess that My Beautiful Laundrette appeared quite shocking, touching as it does on so many moral issues. Now though these boundaries are familiar, allowing one to look past the surface; down below to the underlying theme, that money is the ultimate equaliser. On this basis the world splits into two halves. If you're wealthy then creed, sexual orientation and all other barriers can be overcome, otherwise forget about it. When you're on the bottom of the heap there's little that you can do about it, except maybe through familial assistance? In support of this theory, the script beautifully wields its relationships, in all of their complexity; only through such contacts can prrogress be made. A subversive idea for the '80s that chimes with the less selfish '90s.
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