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Brick Lane

Two Sisters

The short street of the title is at the center of a community of Bangladeshi emigres, part of the England-bound South Asian diaspora from what was once the jewel in the British Empire’s crown. Brick Lane is really a somewhat isolated refuge from the London megalopolis and its diverse peoples. Except for the increasingly belligerent young nativist toughs who glower at and sometimes threaten the “Pakis” they fear and hate.

Tannishta Chatterjee in Brick Lane

Nazneen (Tannish Chatterjee), the thirtyish woman at the heart of Sarah Gavron’s lyrically atmospheric film, has noticed the young white men who loiter menacingly in the street below her window. The sequestered Nazneen has been in London for sixteen years, but neither she nor her older husband (Satish Kaushik), nor their two daughters have seen most of the landmarks of this ancient city, not even Buckingham Palace. Her focus and imagination are directed to her rural birthplace and the sister she left there when her father sent her far away to an arranged marriage.

The wistful narration in her voice recites lines from the letters she has regularly sent her sister ever since. “What cannot be changed must be borne,” she reminds her sibling, quoting their mother. This parent, however, could not bear the rural life, Nazneen recalls yearningly; she drowned herself when the girls were still very young. Now Nazneen dreams of that lost world as she dutifully serves her pompously Micawberish husband, buffering the tense relations between him and the girls, particularly the increasingly rebellious and westernized Shana (Naeema Begum). And she dreams of a return to her homeland.

When her improvident, Chaucer-quoting spouse quits his job in a pique, the ensuing threat to this dream drives Nazneen to a personally radical step: She starts sewing jeans at home in defiance of her prickly husband. And she becomes increasingly friendly with Karim (Christopher Simpson), the young man who regularly brings the jeans and her payment from his uncle’s factory. Both of these developments deeply alter Nazneen’s relationships, first with her family, then with the world around her.

Gavron’s film contains a number of closely observed details and scenes, and it combines its social realism with carefully composed shots and evocative bursts of montage. The fine cast performs handsomely. But the film’s source, Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, reportedly teemed with characters and incidents. This scaled-down Brick Lane shows signs of a difficult transition. Nazneen’s transformation is a little hard to accept, and her husband’s behavioral changes are even more difficult to believe in.

From a silly, snobbish pridefulness he moves rather inexplicably to a rueful political and personal wisdom, and a generosity of spirit. Nor does his new thinking seem to make sense, contextually.

Brick Lane is appealing but it never becomes consistently persuasive on a logical basis. It has to be accepted or rejected for its serious intentions, and its admirable but compromised treatment of its characters and theme.


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