Licking against the pricks

How many times in the history of the medium have we seen a single film rattle as many socio-cinematic paradigms—and done it with as much bio—as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)? Scripted by Hanif Kureishi—his first film credit—and directed by Stephen Frears, this incendiary entertainment made movie stars of London’s teeming South Asian community, featured a central romance that was both interracial and gay, and embraced the tenants of Thatcherite hyper-capitalism only to expose it as fundamentally corrupting and ineffectual with regards to the populace at large. Yet at no point does the film draw attention to its importance or iconoclasm. In one of the excellent supplements contained on Criterion’s new DVD and BD releases of My Beautiful Laundrette Frears claims that he initially didn’t really notice the fact that the story was queer. The film feels so utterly focued on story, character development and milieu that I’m inclined to believe him.

My Beautiful Laundrette begins with second-generation Anglo-Pakistani Omar (Gordon Warnecke) essentially trading in his former socialist journalist father, Hussein (Roshan Seth), a man seemingly broken by emigration, for his businessman uncle, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), a man eager to assimilate—complete with white mistress—and capitalize on every carrot of opportunity life in Britain dangles before him. “You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system,” Nasser insists, and Omar is an apt pupil, rapidly going from washing cars in a garage to refurbishing a dilapidated old laundromat in a predominantly Asian South London nieghbourhood. Omar does this with the assistance of a lanky white working-class factotum named Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis in his breakout role), who along the way becomes Omar’s lover, a development which seems perfectly natural—though its not to interfere with Omar’s single-minded fixation on making lots of money. Homophobia takes a backseat to racism in any case, with the local white thugs threatening Johnny simply for accepting a brown man as his employer. Eventually, in a sequence Frears stages like a late western, those thugs launch a vicious attack on the whole lot of them, making for a ugly climax—though that’s not the end of the story.

So few films had previously plunged a mainstream audience in what was until then an all but invisible immigrant community, with its own rules and ideals and wild contrasts. My Beautiful Laudrette launched a new wave of Asian-centered British films, not to mention Kureishi’s career—he would go on to script Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), My Son the Fanatic (1997), The Mother (2003) and Venus (2006), continuing a thread not only of immigrant representation but sexually audacity. Frears would begin a winning streak that would peak with The Grifters (1990) and Day-Lewis, having emulated Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood here, would become like them a star of the first order, known for transforming himself through methody immersion in vocal and body work. Though one could argue that the greatest moments throughout the rest of Day-Lewis’ career, from Christy Brown to Lincoln, are only ever on par with that delicious furtive lick of Omar’s neck, a gesture Criterion has fittingly placed right on the cover of its superb new package.

                 

Tamara Drewe: Vaguely feminist farmland farce hardly Hardy but not half-bad either

Based on Posey Simmonds’ graphic novel, itself a clever, loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd, Tamara Drewe is set largely in and around a rural Dorset writer’s colony, where a celebrated mystery novelist’s under-loved helpmeet (Tamsin Grieg) serves nummy snacks in dowdy turtlenecks, functions as an unacknowledged editor of sorts to her numerous and apparently mostly talentless residents, attempts to tolerate her husband’s philandering, and gradually kens on to the fact that the shlubby American Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) who keeps coming back to massage his writer’s block is probably falling hopelessly in love with her.

This is a rather sprawling ensemble comedy, so that’s not even the half of what’s going on in Moira Buffini’s adaptation—I haven’t yet introduced the titular character, who isn’t exactly the heroine of the piece but, most pleasingly embodied by Gemma Arterton, is quite obviously its star, a successful young journalist returning to her country home after years away with a new nose and a body to keep the cocks crowing night and day, making her grand appearance in ass-exposing cut-offs and a five-alarm red tank-top. Before we’re through she’ll have wittingly or unwittingly seduced a pretentious London rocker (Dominic Cooper), an even more pretentious middle-aged scribe (Roger Allam), and the local ex-con farm hunk (Luke Evans, sort of a less crazed-looking Michael Shannon) who opens the film shirtless and sweating against the setting sun in a tableau that could grace the cover of any six-dozen Harlequin Romances.

All this business—there’s still the mischievous teenage chorus to work in!—makes for a precarious balancing act. The multiple narratives are well-structured enough to keep us oriented, but from the get-go the overall tone slips into a decidedly broad brand of British comedy, replete with pissing cows and one guy eavesdropping while dropping a log, and Buffini’s dialogue is at times so on the nose—“She doesn’t need a writer; she needs a man!”—it’s nearly comical during those rare scenes that seem designed to be otherwise. The landscapes meanwhile are lovely, the story’s divided into seasons, and the occasional glimpse of London makes the big city seem dreary even for the rich. Director Stephen Frears seems at his best here when nurturing connections between his largely superb cast, as well as when emphasizing the script’s loving homage to bucolic life and sexually empowered women and its barely contained disdain for artsy retreats and emotionally immature men. Having said that, if a couple of the guys were more interesting, it may have elevated the film as a whole.

Already dead: The Hit

The mystery at the heart of The Killers—whether we refer to the version starring Burt Lancaster (1946) or the radically reconfigured too-violent-for-TV version with Lee Marvin (64)—concerns a marked man’s resignation to death. What would make an ostensibly vital young man accept his executioners without a fight? Why wouldn’t he run when he knows they’re coming to snuff out his life? The special genius of the 1964 version is that, good to its title, it’s actually about the killers, allowing them to ponder openly the psychological state of the person they’ve disposed of—something hired killers aren’t supposed to do. Half the point of hiring a killer is to place murder in the hands of someone with no personal investment in the victim. But the movies have been telling us over and over that killing’s rarely so simple a task, and killers, for all their repugnancy, can feel strangely close to us. They can help us sort through big questions that stories about far noble people have a harder time addressing.

British director Stephen Frears’ The Hit (84), written by Peter Prince, returns to the muddy existential stream of The Killers, though it’s not directly related to either previous film or to the Ernest Hemingway story upon which those films were very loosely based. It follows London mobster-turned-supergrass Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp) from his testifying against his cronies in court to his idyllic life in hiding in Spain, a life that, ten years after his betrayal, is about to end. He’s abducted by a thin, funereal figure in a pale suit named Braddock (John Hurt) and a flamboyantly unseasoned thug of an apprentice named Myron (Tim Roth). They are to drive Willie over the border to Paris where they’ll finish the job in the presence of their employer. But what begins to eat at the voluble Myron, and perhaps even at the stoic Braddock, is how detached Parker seems about the whole thing. He’s positively serene, explaining, with a shrug and a smile, that dying’s no big deal. “It’s as natural as breathing.” Why isn’t he nervous, groveling, wriggling away? He must have something up his sleeve.

As with The Killers, there’ll come a point in The Hit where the nature of this resignation will be exposed. Well, kind of. Unlike the victims in The Killers, Willie’s interior logic doesn’t seem to be dictated by frustrated romance or unconscious desires for suicide. What’s especially interesting is how The Hit, which may very well not have been written with The Killers in mind at all, seems to have learned a little something from both Killers. It initially has us identify with Willie, who may be a dirty snitch, but whose desire to escape the London underworld for the Costa del sol is hardly tough to relate to. He’s also handsome, charming, and utterly watchable. Which is to say he’s Terrence Stamp, who would bring a similar flair to a not dissimilar character many years later in The Limey (99), which itself appropriated images of Stamp playing yet another sympathetic criminal in Poor Cow (67).

But then something deliciously odd happens, something the classicists say you’re not to do. The Hit switches protagonists, gradually abandoning Willie in favour of Braddock, the least forthcoming guy in the movie, a man whose true identity is so elusive that the final words spoken are questions put to him about which of many men he might actually be. Hurt is at his most fascinatingly blank. He doesn’t answer. And this blurring of identities, along with the burrowing into a new life while shedding the old one, along with the Spanish landscape and the beautiful young woman along for the ride (Laura del Sol), recalls yet another movie about unspoken desperation and the complicated assimilation of roles and duties: Antonioni’s The Passenger (75). So besides helping us to rediscover a forgotten gem of 1980s British cinema, a movie that’s smart, artful, strange, often gorgeous and entertaining enough to recommend to just about anyone, not to say brilliantly acted, Criterion’s new DVD release is also a fascinating little piece in a larger cinematic lineage, pointing both backward and forward toward a number of history’s more interesting movies that deal with the psychic geometries of death, assassination, secrets, and surrender.

Among Criterion’s typically superb special features, there’s a terrific essay by Graham Fuller and an audio commentary that finds Frears, Prince, Hurt, Roth and editor Mick Audsley recalling in relaxed, accessible language the thrill of moving into features after years in British television, the challenges of making a road movie in a foreign country with very little money, and how awesome is Spanish legend Fernando Rey, who plays a key supporting role. I especially appreciated Roth’s personal musings on the diversity of performance styles on display. The Hit was one of Roth’s first major roles, and, while watching a shot that features he, Hurt and Stamp seated together in the car, he draws our attention to how elegantly distinct acting sensibilities can harmonize, all of them playfully rubbing up against one another for the camera to simply soak up. All in all, a treat.