BRICK LANE
Directed by Sarah Gavron
Written by Abi Morgan
and Laura Jones
Starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson, Naeema Begum,
Lana Rahman
Classification: PG
**½
The unsung lives of ordinary women is a rich literary ground but too often, even the best-intended filmmakers fail back on familiar Victorian and romance-pulp-fiction formulas. Brick Lane, adapted and radically reduced from Monica Ali's Man Booker-nominated novel about a Bengali wife finding her independence in contemporary London, hits all the clichés of romantic literary adaptation: montage, letters read aloud in voice-over, a swelling musical score. Even in Brick Lane's unusual setting - a bustling Bengali community in a crowded East London tenement near the street that gives the movie its name - everything feels too familiar.
Bollywood actress Tannishtha Chatterjee stars as Nazneen, a Bengali woman sent away to an arranged marriage in England at the age of 17 by her father, after his wife's suicide. The movie leaps from the pastoral village where she played with her sister to London in 2001. The shy, sad-eyed Nazneen, now in her early 30s, is living in a cramped apartment with two adolescent girls and a tubby middle-aged windbag of a husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who has read Proust but doesn't seem to have heard of foreplay. When the quiet desperation gets too much, Nazneen may be headed toward the same fate as her mother.
When the thin-skinned Chanu quits in job in pique after being passed over for a promotion, Nazneen is forced to take in sewing to support the family and pay off the money lender. Handsome delivery man Karim (Christopher Simpson) brings armloads of jeans each week for stitching, then hangs around to chat. Mutual loneliness turns to affection - and then, from the bedroom to community-action meetings. After Sept. 11, 2001, when anti-Muslim racial attacks increase, Karim turns to Islamic militancy. He idealizes Nazneen as a stereotypical simple village wife and he wants her to leave Chanu and marry him.
Caught up in Karim's enthusiasm for Muslim pride and identity, Nazneen apparently begins to gain her independence, emerging from sari-clad modesty to sensible cloth-coated English assertiveness. At least that's what happens on the outside. Silent fortitude is never that easy to catch on camera, and Chatterjee's performance is understated to the point of opacity. Nor is there much offered in the script by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones to suggest how the character evolves.
Most of the dramatic fireworks are saved for the film's third act, where Nazneen, emerging from her cocoon, begins to spread her wings. She wonders about the value of her dalliances with the man who brings her boxes of pants and militant ideology. She also begins to question her idealization of the old country and begins to see that her husband may have been more on the ball than she thought.
One measure of Brick Lane's failure to bring Nazneen to life is the way that Chanu seems to take over the film. As played by Indian actor, director and comedian Satish Kaushik, he's a lively, tragicomic character whose pomposity compensates for his ever-present feeling of humiliation.
You think of The Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden with a few more years of schooling when Chanu sniffs that his unappreciative employers have probably "never read the Brontes or Thackeray."
The arc of Nazneen's character, from drudge to feminist heroine, is predictably saintly. Chanu is a far more intriguingly human figure, the redeemed fool.
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