MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE

The romance between Omar, a Londoner of Pakistani descent (who has to prove his entrepreneurial spirit by pulling one of his family's self-service laundries out of ruin) and his childhood pal Johnny, a proudly white streetwalker sympathetic to the National Front. And all of this set against the grim reality of deep Thatcherism, when racism, homophobia and classism were perfectly fine. 

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE  is a collaborative effort between the director, a young Stephen Frears, who was about to become one of Britain's most significant filmmakers, and Hanif Kureishi, a screenwriter then on the threshold of a major literary career. It is a landmark film, especially for Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrays the character of Johnny.

Frears and Kureishi are not afraid of controversy. They reverse the usual order associated with the 1980s: here, entrepreneurship is represented by dynamic Pakistanis, not the English middle class. The white English are instead portrayed as underclass, venting their frustrations in aggression and street brawls. The film's subversiveness goes further, mercilessly scoring all (even the positive ones) stereotypes in the perception of each group presented. Playing with the conventions of comedy and gritty social realism, the filmmakers have created a work that is radical in its message and spares no one. Its main theme revolves around the complexity of identity and its ambiguity, aiming to dismantle rigid perceptions and reveal the political dimension of Otherness.

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Karolina Kosińska