This Little Movie is Made of Straw

Brick Lane Directed by Sarah Gavron

Brick Lane is one of those depressing movies in which you catch a glimpse of the tighter, leaner, stronger film that could have been.  Based on Monica Ali’s best-selling novel that detailed the adventures and foibles of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl sent to London for an arranged marriage, and her sister Hasina, who remains behind to follow her own wishes, the book was both a character study and a portrait of London in the 1980s and ’90s. And ultimately, it was an elegant examination of what being a Muslim in the West meant after 9/11. What the movie adaptation seems to be aiming for is something akin to Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple; but alas, Abi Morgan and Laura Jones’ screenplay manages to fall far from even that overblown production. The problems should not be laid at the actors’ feet by any means.

Tannishtha Chatterjee manages to perfectly calibrate Nazneen’s blossoming from excruciating shyness to a strong woman willing to stand up to the bullies who fill her world. And Christopher Simpson, as the sexy boss who helps Nazneen realize her true worth, leaves no doubt as to why this hesitant and frightened woman would radically alter her views and beliefs for him. What renders the movie merely a worthy effort is the screenplay. Condensing the events of a novel is always a difficult task, but Morgan and Jones have also chosen to condense time as well, squishing Nazneen’s growth into less than a year and expecting the audience to believe she spent 16 years in London without making a single friend.

After briefly showing us a woman who subjugates herself to her husband and commands no respect from her rebellious oldest daughter, Nazneen abruptly acquires a friend, a younger lover and a job hemming garments. Which begs the question of why she didn’t bother to try for any of those things in the previous 16 years, but Brick Lane crams so much information into its 110-minute running time, any questions you might have are constantly replaced by new ones. Such as: “Oh, right. Where’s her sister been all this time? This is only the second letter we’ve had from her? Why do we care about her again?”

And that might be the most frustrating thing about Brick Lane. Nazneen is a strong enough character (and Chatterjee a reasonably talented actress) that her story on its own could easily carry a movie. But determined to remain true to the novel—in their own fashion—Morgan and Jones insist on shoehorning Hasina into the story. Her final letter is their crowning achievement of confusion. After being forced to face the truth about Hasina by her toad-like husband (the very funny Satish Kaushik, giving a pitch-perfect performance as a pretentious immigrant who goes on and on about Thackeray but still hasn’t mastered the English language), Nazneen has a breakdown and remains in bed for an unspecified amount of time. A day? A week? It’s never made clear, but that doesn’t prevent Nazneen from being upset with Karim for never stopping by. Whether or not we should take her side also remains unclear, since we have no idea how long she was ill.

That episode pretty neatly sums up the film’s problems. Chock full of flashy dramatic moments—from Nazneen telling off a moneylender to a nighttime chase down the streets of London—Brick Lane revels in confrontations, but they burst forth without any build. Fewer incendiary incidents and a red pencil applied to the script might have freed the good movie that’s buried somewhere beneath layers of unearned emotional conflict.