For several years, the Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "My Son the Fanatic") appeared to corner the market on movies about Muslim immigrants in modern England. No longer.
Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane," based on a popular novel by Monica Ali, offers a refreshingly feminist variation on what was beginning to look like a male-centric genre. Set in the Bengali area of East London, it focuses on a long-suffering wife, Nazneen, who rebels against an arranged marriage by taking a lover.
Her older, chubbier husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), appears to be an insensitive oaf and a hopeless businessman. Her handsome young lover, Karim (Christopher Simpson), is romantic and charismatic and seems to offer a future.
It's a familiar situation, just familiar enough to encourage yawns (Nazneen's chief inspiration appears to be television viewings of "Brief Encounter"). But Gavron and her screenwriters, Laura Jones and Abi Morgan, steer away from rote characterizations and enthusiastically reach for complications. So do the actors, most of whom bring a spark to their roles.
As Tannishtha Chatterjee plays her, Nazneen is never the simple village girl her husband wants to see. She may appear to accept passive explanations for sexist traditions, but when she becomes desperate for money, she starts her own sewing business.
Chanu resents her ability to succeed on her own. Although he brings on his own tragedy ("I resigned this afternoon," he says when he's passed over for a promotion), he seems genuinely to feel guilty that he can't put food on the table. He also deludes himself that he's becoming an Internet visionary and "part of the World Wide Web."
For all his questionable moments, Chanu is far from the monster he could have become. Indeed, he begins to sound like the voice of reason in a post-Sept. 11 world in which Karim turns unstable and Nazneen begins to entertain the idea that their relationship was mostly a matter of wish fulfillment.
Gavron, a prizewinning British television director making her feature-film debut, is at her best evoking the social chaos in England that followed the World Trade Center's destruction and Tony Blair's angry speeches. She also suggests that Sept. 11 didn't change that much for people like Nazneen and Chanu, who were persecuted before and after the attacks.
"Brick Lane" is ultimately a minor achievement, and something less than the Dickensian epic it might have been. But it's rich in characters who ring true whether they're on-screen for a short time (Nazneen and Chanu's daughters, a pushy loan shark) or they're front and center through most of the picture.
John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com
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