My Beautiful Laundrette Review

Channel 4 paid for this as a television film, and the low budget turns out to be an engine rather than a handicap. Stephen Frears keeps the 16mm camera close and unfussy, so the south London streets look like actual streets instead of a designed version of Thatcher's Britain, and when the launderette finally opens with its neon and its piped music the vulgarity registers as genuine triumph.

Hanif Kureishi's script refuses every available lesson about race, class and sex. Saeed Jaffrey's Nasser is the best thing in it, a landlord who evicts squatters in the morning and quotes poetry in the afternoon without noticing a contradiction, and Roshan Seth, bedridden and drinking, supplies the grief. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Johnny as a man whose racism was a social convenience he has quietly stopped paying for, all watchfulness and small physical offerings, and the back room scene during the opening party, with a business deal and a dance going on a few feet away through the glass, is still startling.

The trouble is the last twenty minutes, which pile an eviction, a beating and a drug subplot on top of one another and settle none of them. The closing image of two men washing each other's wounds earns its optimism anyway.