Salman Rushdie rightfully took umbrage at Germaine Greer’s condescending article in The Guardian from 2006 about the protests surrounding the making of Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane, which is adapted from the Monica Ali novel of the same name. But now that the cat is out of the bag, revealing itself as a nauseating portrayal of immigrant dreams, it practically validates Greer’s presumptuous assertions about authorship and representation.
Gavron, whose outsider relationship to the titular East London curry strip couldn’t be any more obvious, and co-screenwriters Laura Jones and Abi Morgan have designed the film with the same book-of-the-month-club demographic that Deepa Mehta’s works appeal to in mind, except that Mehta’s filmic instincts are at least sensual, whereas Gavron’s are just tawdry. Awash in trite stylistic shorthand, Brick Lane begins with a candy-colored vision of life in Bangladesh that practically hurts the eyes, and it’s from this movie-trailer sphere of incessantly whooshing fade outs that a young girl departs for a less blissful life in London.
Twenty years older, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is seen enduring a succession of embarrassments at the hand of a husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), whose ogre-ish body predictably fits his personality. But whether Chanu is fucking her without looking her in the eyes or snoring profusely, Nazneen at least has her memories of her youth in Bangladesh, where the only thing she and her sister apparently did was run through grassland.
If it weren’t painful enough that the film entirely trades in caricature (Chanu speaks only in fortune-cookie aphorisms, never admits to being wrong, and feels emasculated when Nazneen, the wilting flower, takes a sewing job to help the family make ends meet), its queasily romanticized style misrepresents the sad and sometimes perilous lives of its subjects. Chanu is surprisingly redeemed by film’s end, but even when 9/11 is invoked, Brick Lane doesn’t so much suggest a melodrama of the heart and spirit as it does an explosion at a fabric store.
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