Brick Lane (06.20) falls into the same category as the recently released The Visitor. Both contempo dramas deal with loneliness and isolation inside the big city, and are tailored for adult audiences. Unfortunately, both films come equipped with the sort of generic trailers that sell the storyline short. Instead of encompassing the proposed formulaic “button-pushers” as seen in the trailer, both film examples aren’t Ken Loach territory, but they both offer raw characters with non-easy resolutions.
On a comparative scale, I thought Tom McCarthy’s film is a better, more even effort, yet the final resting spot for Sarah Gavron’s London-set picture reminds us that the film’s antagonist is slightly more complex than initially thought.
Based on the 2003 epic novel by Monica Ali about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, this explores the British immigrant experience via a beautiful young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen (Chatterjee), who arrives in 1980s London, leaving behind her beloved sister and home, for an arranged marriage and a new life. Trapped within the four walls of her flat in East London, and in a loveless marriage with the middle aged Chanu (Kaushik), she fears her soul is quietly dying. Her sister Hasina (Zafreen), meanwhile, continues to live a carefree life back in Bangladesh, stumbling from one adventure to the next. Nazneen struggles to accept her lifestyle, and keeps her head down in spite of life’s blows, but she soon discovers that life cannot be avoided – and is forced to confront it the day that the hotheaded young Karim (Simpson) comes knocking at her door.
Below is the domestic one-sheet which plugs the many stops it had on the 2007 world film festival circuit.
