Well there seems to be little interest in the Frears forum, OK, not little interest, none.

I love My Beautiful Laundrette, which is also one of the first specifically gay movies I ever saw, so it has personal meaning to me beyond the quality of the picture.

My favorite scene has the uncle and his mistress waltzing through the laundrette while the two boys have sex in the back. Two forms of "illicit" sex revealed as the genuine instances of romance they are (neither is a case of "just sex" though both relationships are theoretically based on sex). And both are supposedly based on commercial considerations, as the laundrette is, but all three are instances of personal expression and beauty.

My Beautiful Laundrette was the first Frears movie I saw. It was also the first time I saw Daniel Day Lewis. The story about Pakistani immigrants in England is wriiten by Hanif Kureishy, son of a Pakistani father, and brings out intergenerational tensions between immigrants and their children living in a rundown London neighborhood, as well as ambivalent relationships between Pakistani youth and the local kids. This was a territory not traveled before, and is quite different from the story of Dr.Aziz of A Passage to India or the story 20 years later of Pakistani kids blowing up London's subway trains. The direction is very sensitive, the flow of the narrative is smooth, and the movie has pathos and comedy in equal measure.

I just finished watching My Beautiful Laundrette.

I found it to be a strange movie. And as I've come to appreciate how well Frears movies are shot, this movie is beautifully shot. It has a rather herky jerky pacing regarding the scene transitions. It's almost like many of the scenes haven't quite finished. But I didn't mind that. I sort of liked it. I liked the movie overall, even though many times I couldn't quite figure out what the hell was happening. And I found many of the actions of the characters hard to believe. I'm not talking about what they do, but how they react in some situations. It's hard to think of any sympathetic characters in the movie with the exception of John, who is a reformed fascist hooligan, the mistress (Shirley Anne Field's character) and to a small extent the uncle. It's a wild ride with a lot of missing details, but that is somehow part of the charm of the movie.

I'll write more about what I think of it when the forum starts to roll. I hope it does start to roll.

What does anyone think of the rather unrealistic actions by the characters in Laundrette in regards to their seeming lack of care when confronted by hooligans, confronting relatives with a history of violence, have forbidden sex at a time and place that is wide open to discovery, and seemingly an unconcerned attitude about getting caught cheating or any other deception?

I also could never figure out what exactly this clan of Pakistanis did. There is a drug transaction, for instance, that I could never figure out and was never explained. Among a lot of other things. It seemed almost like there were significant parts of the movie which were edited out.

The sex, as in real life, felt like spontaneous, carefree actions in the moment.

My Beautiful Laundrette
UK (1985): Drama
98 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc

A startlingly fresh movie about life in South London among the surly white street gangs who live on the dole and feel that they're in a dead-end society and the Pakistani immigrants who know that this society is the best they can hope for, and try to move upward by wriggling through the cracks. In the foreground is a love affair between a dark-eyed, softly handsome, almost flowerlike Pakistani teenager, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), who grew up in this neighborhood, and a young blond street lout, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis). They become partners when Omar persuades his slumlord uncle (Saeed Jaffrey) to let him have a ratty-looking failed launderette, and the two boys, using stolen money, turn it into the launderette of their flashy dreams. Directed by Stephen Frears, from a witty script by the young playwright Hanif Kureishi, who was born in South London to a Pakistani father and a white English mother, the film catches you up in the racketeering and decay of modern big-city life; you feel that your blinders have been taken off. Frears has a sensual, highly developed visual style, and he's responsive to the uncouthness and energy in English life--he's responsive to what went into the punk-music scene and to what goes into teenage gang life. It's an enormous pleasure to see a movie that's really about something, and that doesn't lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easily. (It's down before you notice it.) Written for British television, on a budget of under $850,000, the film was shot in 16-mm; the blow-up to 35-mm is near-miraculous. The cast includes Shirley Anne Field, Roshan Seth, Rita Wolf, and Souad Faress. The cinematography is by Oliver Stapleton.
For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.