Brick Lane (15)

Cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson

Debut director Gavron and writers Abi Morgan and Laura Jones have gone a long way towards solving the difficulties of adapting Monica Ali's much praised novel for the screen. The story of a young Bangladeshi girl Nazneen, who is sent to London as a teenager for an arranged marriage with a much older man, which originally followed its heroine from birth into her early thirties, has been cut to the chase as it were to concentrate on her life changing year in the East End's Brick Lane, when she meets and falls in love with Karim, the radically politicised young man, who delivers and collects the piecework sewing, with which she supplements the family income.  

Chatterjee as Nazneen is a very beautiful woman, who gives a touching performance.  The character is though often irritatingly passive.  As her elder daughter Shanana (Naeema Begum) remarks angrily, she never says what she wants. The novel went some way in the scenes of Nazneen's early life in London in explaining how she is transformed from the lively child we see in the Bangladeshi flashbacks playing with her beloved sister into the dutiful and often silent wife.  Particularly important in that transformation is the death of Nazneen's infant son, reduced in the film to a rarely referred to past tragedy.   And by losing most of the long sequences of letters from her sister, which sometimes made the novel rather tedious reading, we also lose the sense of how important that relationship and its tragic outcome are to Nazneen's life.  The film also relies somewhat heavily on montages - time which might perhaps have been better spent in going deeper into the characters' inner lives particulalry Nazneen's and perhaps seeing something of the sister's tandem life in Bangladesh.  Some of the colourful supporting characters, such as Nazneen's friend and neighbour Razia (Harvey Virdi) may also have benefitted from a little more screen time.  

This is, however, a very good looking, beautifully shot film, which not only captures the exotic nature of Brick Lane market and Bangladesh itself but also finds a certain beauty in the dreariness of the council block, where Nazneen and her family live and in a striking sequence on Liverpool Street Station, when she is in pursuit of the rebellious runaway Shanana.  Simpson as Karim is suitably passionate and fiery, though the love affair between him and Nazneen has a rather remote and bloodless quality with little sense of the danger it presents to the lovers in the context of their society.  The more interesting performance comes from Bollywood star Kaushik as Nazneen's husband Chanu.  Overweight, lazy and full of himself, he seems at first a bit of a pompous prat but as the film progresses we do get to know him and appreciate his strengths.   While fourteen year old Begum as the feisty Shahana is satisfyingly full blooded and feisty.