Brick Lane

by Jonathan Murray

The final image in Brick Lane's opening-title sequence sums up either the film's signature achievement or its signal failure. A long shot shows central protagonist Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) disappearing behind one of the many front doors dotting the monolithic façade of a public housing block in East Central London. This concludes a seven-minute prologue in which director Sarah Gavron condenses the first hundred pages and more of Monica Ali's 2003 source novel. Digitally colorized shots of 1970s and 1980s Bangladesh indicate the extent to which Nazneen has idealized her memories of growing up in that time and place, her close relationship with younger sister Hasina (Zafreen) an especial source of reverie. A rural Bangladeshi childhood remembered as idyll ends, however, with the suicide of the girls' mother. Consequently, their father arranges marriage between Nazneen, now a teenager, and the significantly older Chanu (Satish Kaushik), an immigrant living in London and a man she has never met. Some fifteen years later, thirty-something Nazneen is shown walking through and around Brick Lane, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the United Kingdom. Ghosting through a multicultural urban milieu radically different from that she was born into, she speaks to no one, slips ever further from the following camera, and disappears finally behind the front door of a flat as cramped and constricting as her monotonous existence—dutiful wife, mother, and nothing more.

It's worth outlining the possible case against Brick Lane at the outset: there's no better way to make, ultimately, a positive assessment of the film. For its detractors, the centripetal trajectory of Nazneen's opening journey will mirror that taken by Sarah Gavron's movie. Like water sliding down a drain, the pressing social and cultural phenomena the central protagonist's life story speaks of sluice through a private doorway and vanish. Her home might almost be fashioned from gingerbread rather than reinforced concrete, situated in a fairytale forest not a multicultural metropolis, for all the overt relation it seems to bear to the post-9/11 experience of British Muslim society. A film that might have tackled head-on consequences accruing to the protean fusion of radically different cultures, and the ever-escalating trend of global mass migration, instead bows its head and curtails its horizons. We're left instead with a timid, if momentarily diverting and prettily rendered alternative: an intensely private drama of matrimonial frustration and romantic indiscretion.

Nazneen and Chanu's ossified marriage is changed irrevocably when the former buys a sewing machine. She does so through necessity as much as choice, driven by the need to financially support her family, husband, and teenage daughters Shahana (Naeema Begum) and Bibi (Lana Rahman), after Chanu resigns his job, disillusioned by his persistent failure to win promotion. Yet a purchase which seems initially to confirm Nazneen's domestic incarceration yet further—not working from home but home as work—brings her into contact with British-born Karim (Christopher Simpson), the young man who delivers garments to her flat for finishing. She begins an affair with him, and the emotional and physical self-confidence this engenders allows Nazneen to assert, eventually, her presence and identity within the immediate family unit.

Yet the seemingly clear-cut contrast between Karim and Chanu and the divergent futures they seem to promise Nazneen become more complicated as Brick Lane progresses. Karim comes to seem less attractive than at first, Chanu more so. The former's marked physical and cultural differences from the latter (young, fit, second-generation, British-Bangladeshi vs. old, fat, first-generation, Bangladeshi-British) cannot disguise the fact that he is equally inclined to idealize Nazneen as archetype not individual. It's Chanu who valorizes her as a living example of the "girl from the village" in the early pages of Ali's novel. Crucially, however, there's no interpretative violence in transferring those words to Karim's mouth in Gavron's film. Meanwhile, Chanu is shown to possess significant redeeming qualities obscured by his complacent, corpulent exterior. He loves his family deeply and is horrified equally by the rise of Western anti-Muslim and Muslim anti-Western sentiment in the wake of 9/11. Chanu is able to view this process with far more humanistic caution and historical context than Karim can or will. Ultimately, Nazneen ends her affair with Karim, while Chanu agrees to return to Bangladesh on his own. Liberated, albeit not in the sense that Brick Lane seems initially to promise, Nazneen stays behind in London with her two daughters. Wider context—the effect of 9/11 on Western Muslims, the changing role and self-image of immigrant communities within contemporary British society, the ongoing, intergenerational debates about tradition, gender and religious identity within those groups—are all glimpsed fleetingly from Nazneen's perspective. The main effect, though, is to impress upon viewers just how cloistered her vantage point is. Ultimately, Brick Lane temporarily imprisons the world-view of all who watch it behind bars made from net curtain. This is so even while the film ostensibly supports Nazneen's quiet attempts to break free from something approaching a state of psychological house arrest.

In this regard Brick Lane seems markedly at odds with much recent film and television drama made by British Asian directors and/or exploring aspects of British Asian experience. While echoing recent British Asian cinema's pronounced engagement with the popular, Gavron's film at first glance seems to lack its direct, gutsy engagement with the political. Like Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002), Yasmin (Kenny Glenaan, 2004), and Britz (Peter Kosminsky, 2007), Brick Lane puts a female protagonist center stage. This recurring strategy reflects the extent to which filmmakers have been aware that issues of gender inequality complicate fatally any attempt to construct monolithic representations of any given ethnic group within British society. Yet earlier films acknowledge the complex intersection of ethnic identities and identity politics with other kinds not as an alibi to disavow social and political comment per se. A shared characteristic of the works listed above is their desire to inhabit mainstream genres—terrorism thriller (Britz), social realism (Yasmin), romantic comedy (Bhaji…, Bend It…)—to explore in as public a way as possible a range of contemporary British identities and political issues. The latter include the radicalization of many young British Muslims by the U.K. government's deeply contentious torrent of antiterrorism and national security legislation in the last six years (Yasmin, Britz) and many British Asian women's attempts to negotiate conflicting secular and religious prescriptions of gender identity (Bhaji, Bend It, Yasmin). Perhaps most fundamentally, all of the films listed above, not to mention contemporaneous works such as My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1998), East is East (Damien O'Donnell, 1999) and Ae Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004), explore the transformative, sometimes traumatic, effect of intergenerational conflict within immigrant British communities now at least three or four generations old.

In the case of Brick Lane, however, an immediate sense of such conflict might be gauged more readily from circumstances surrounding the film's production than from the film itself. Summer 2006 location shooting in the Brick Lane district was disrupted by a campaign of protest led by self-appointed community leaders against, in the words of one, "a film which degrades our community." Concerns raised included a (nonexistent) scene where a leech falls from a Bangladeshi woman's hair into a pot of curry and a more general sense that Ali's novel and Sarah Gavron's film misrepresented Sylheti Bangladeshis as backward and uneducated. Such agitation was widely reported (and many would say therefore vastly overblown) in the British press. Leading lights in the national literary scene traded blows over the right to free speech. Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Germaine Greer advised Bangladeshi Britons to steer clear of Brick Lane, book and film, a piece of counsel which prompted Salman Rushdie to label her "philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful." In a lengthy article in the same publication, Monica Ali decried the controversy around filming as a symptomatic example of an increasingly dominant "marketplace of outrage" within the British public sphere, a media-orchestrated fete designed to whip up lucrative controversy around issues of race even where none exist.

Ironically when Brick Lane then appeared in British cinemas last autumn, most onlookers seemed wrong-footed by the perceived absence of anything obvious to get outraged about: if only tub-thumpers on all sides in 2006 could have been warned in advance. Perhaps the most vivid expression of such deflated, disorientated expectation was articulated by The Sunday Telegraph reviewer who compared the movie unfavorably to its own central character, "like some placating wife… noticeably eager to smooth over tricky situations long before they ignite." Yet this simile of the cowed spouse, coined to express disappointment, brings us back to the early shot of Nazneen disappearing behind her front door, and also to a much more positive reading of Brick Lane, which this reviewer would like to suggest as it reaches American shores.

Another way of looking at Brick Lane's opening sequence and its final long shot is to focus on Nazneen's smallness, denoted and connoted at the same time. Her gender, cultural background (especially when her relatively young age is taken into account, she is a far less Westernized female protagonist than those populating recent British Asian films), and low socio-economic status conspire to obscure Nazneen's visibility within contemporary U.K. film and popular cultures. Brick Lane's originality and success lies in the film's refusal to let its central character, her experiences and desires, be drowned out by the claims of more voluble identities or more apparently pressing political issues. Nazneen declines eventually the preordained domestic roles she is expected to inhabit without question or complaint. So too Brick Lane refuses the entrenched rituals of legitimization many seem to want the film to have participated in, not only to justify the near exclusivity of its narrative focus on Nazneen, but also its implicit proposal that such a character was worthy of extended public portrayal in the first place. She is neither recuperated as especially representative (a cipher for a single, all-inclusive British-Bangladeshi identity) or instructive (a handy vehicle for a formally politicized allegorical dispensation on post-9/11 geopolitics).

While Brick Lane the film jettisons much—perhaps inevitably—from Brick Lane the 500-page novel, it carefully preserves a central creative impulse lying behind the latter. This impulse Monica Ali herself described in a November 2007 conversation with Hanif Kureshi at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London: an urge to kick against "the tyranny of representation" she felt was foisted upon British Asian artists from a range of perspectives with little or nothing else in common. Sarah Gavron's film adaptation adopts Ali's self-justifying suggestion that "fiction succeeds to the extent that it is particular, not representative." What results is a film which, as Ali notes, "is political only in one very particular way: the story is told from the point of view of a marginalized voice… in a society which too often measures its minorities in banner headlines."

The filmic Brick Lane's prioritization of the particular proceeds by way of exclusion in narrative terms: the three-decade sweep and notable, if not dominant, engagement with recent British social history in Ali's novel is mostly lost. By contrast, however, the same strategy depends on a profusion of detail and texture at the level of sound and image. Much of Brick Lane takes place within Nazneen's cluttered, unremarkable home, but this is rendered a fascinating, richly expressive setting through accomplished, considered use of technique by director Sarah Gavron and her key colleagues. Carefully calibrated expressionistic exaggerations of diegetic color abound to communicate Nazneen's largely unspoken inner life. Green sequins on a girl's top reflect on her face to show her initial entrancement with Karim; sunlight filtered through gauzy red curtains turns the dingy prison of her marital bedroom into a boudoir when he occupies it with her. Likewise, Gavron's movement of camera and attention to framing are evocative and subtle in equal measure. Certainly, her repeated preference for adjusting depth of focus once or more within single shots may in part reflect the inconvenience of multiple set-ups when filming in a cramped location. However, her shifting focus back and forth among individual characters during a single take also instantiates powerfully Brick Lane's preferred politics of representation. Even within a nuclear family, much less an entire ethnic community, differences of opinion and identity make such collectives impossible to represent through recourse to a single prescription or articulation of their "authentic" identity, or indeed one fixed focal length from which to record their internal transactions. Finally, we might also note the close attention paid to the symbolic potential of framing. Despite her narrative centrality to Brick Lane, Nazneen—especially when interacting with other characters—is often physically marginalized within the frame, often shot standing uncertainly in doorways. With regard to the latter device Brick Lane recalls especially Kenny Glenaan's Yasmin. Both films make pronounced use of the threshold motif for the same end, connoting the profoundly uncertain cultural status of their respective female protagonists. By virtue of their particular experience of race and gender the women cannot locate themselves clearly, comfortably inside or out of British society as a whole or a particular ethic grouping within it: they are nearly always, yet nearly never, at home.

If, as noted at the outset, one of the first shots in Brick Lane can be seen to sum up both the film's project and a range of possible responses to it, something similar can be said of the movie's final image. With Chanu back in Bangladesh, it is now winter in London. Nazneen and her daughters play joyfully in the snow-covered square at the front of their apartment block, inhabitants of a climate, and by extension a culture, diametrically opposed to the monsoon conditions the infant Nazneen and Hasina frolic in at Brick Lane's early moments. A bird's-eye aerial shot of mother and daughters lying on the ground, waving their arms and legs, cuts to a medium shot of Nazneen on her own. Her face and upper body are framed against an abstract backdrop of pure white. Seeming to suspend Nazneen within a blank canvas, the image may confirm the suspicion nagging some viewers' minds. Have we not just witnessed a drama forcibly, artificially wrenched from its essential cultural and political contexts, a story diminished by the fact that it hangs ultimately in a vacuum of the filmmakers' own, deliberate making? Yet we might suggest instead that Nazneen's unassuming victory is also Brick Lane's. She extricates herself from the oppressive expectations placed upon her by virtue of the body and respective cultures she was born and migrated into. So too the film respectfully declines the received roster of responsibilities preemptively imposed upon it in light of its British Asian subject matter and cultural provenance. Brick Lane isn't a film finely crafted and beautifully performed in order to mask or compensate for its evasion of inarguable ethno-political duties. Rather, its sensuous pleasures and humane insights expand the range of what the political might be, and rethink the relative scale on which it might be expected to loom, within an important tradition of contemporary British film.

To buy Monica Ali's novel, Brick Lane , click here 

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV No.1 2008

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