Saturday, March 17, 2012
CLEANUP
My Beautiful Laundrette (1986)
is one of my all time favorite films. One of the first appearances of Daniel Day-Lewis*, it has success at many levels.
It is a NYTimes Critics' Pick. It has been recognized as one of the most clarified films about race and class in England during the Thatcher era. It serves as a metaphor of the new Great Britain, bringing a young couple together, one Paki and one underclass white thug, together in a business venture which bonds them and serves as a new paradigm for the future.
We see sides of Pakistani culture which we may never been aware of (the film assumes we know all about the white guys).
It is also about generational tension and the failure of the fathers to make good on their visions for their sons.
And it is one of the sexiest of gay films because this young, unlikely couple is gay and, first and foremost, are hot for each other and together for both bad and good times. And for the time, 1986, it was forthright and open about what that relationship involved. Public hugging, kissing, making out, neck licks (love licking necks) and a surprising level of comfort about their own sexuality. These boys are OUT.
I am sure that is the reason why Laundrette is Number 20 in the Fifty Gay Favorite Films.
Director Steven Frears (gay) works on the story by Hanif Kureishi (gay). It was a phenomenal hit. Unexpected.
I have seen it many times and still see nuance that I have missed before.
This is a 5 out of Netflix5 and I will see it again someday.
* From IMDb: My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room with a View both opened in New York on the same day, March 7, 1986. Both movies featured Daniel Day-Lewis in prominent and very different roles: in A Room with a View, he played a repressed, snobbish Edwardian upperclassman, while in Laundrette, he played a lower-class gay ex-skinhead in love with an ambitious Pakistani businessman in Thatcher's London. When American critics saw Day-Lewis, who was then virtually unknown in the US, in two such different roles on the same day, many (including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times and Vincent Canby of The New York Times) raved about the talent it must have taken him to play such vastly different characters.
