BRICK LANE (UK, Sarah Gavron)
One of the enduring characteristics and failings of British cinema has been its insistence on the "well made" film. British cinema of the 1940s, manufactured largely by elites, is perhaps as pure an expression of middle class cinema that can be found in the world and distressingly, it still exists today.
The most recent example can be seen in this adaptation of Monica Ali's best selling novel. A young Pakistani village girl's mother drowns herself and the girl is married off to a porcine, educated white collar worker in London. Separated from her beloved younger sister, the girl sustains a regular correspondence which gives us some insight (though surprisingly not much) into her thoughts.
It's 16 years later in a depressing housing estate in London and the girl has two daughters (one rebellious, the other obedient - thus giving us a predictable ying yang of family dynamics that never plays off in the plot) having lost her first child, a son. The husband is hoping for a promotion while the wife wants to take in sewing work to save up for a trip back home and a much longed for reunion with her sister. The husband is passed over and angrily quits his job while the wife buys a second hand sewing machine. This leads to an eventual affair she has with the handsome young guy who delivers jeans and sparkly tops around the housing estate for sewing work. He's also a Muslim militant and ready to fight back at the racists who provoke anti-immigrant sentiments in this part of London (Brick Lane, in the East End of London was the target of many neo fascist National Front and skinhead parades and attacks against the immigrant community). At the end, the wife terminates her affair, reverses her desire to return home and instead stays in London with her two daughters while the husband goes back to Pakistan. Maybe they will reunite - where is uncertain.
The overriding impression you get from watching this film is that it should be interrupted by commercial breaks. It is a souped up TV film with superior cinematography whose pictorially pleasing but bankrupt images try to gloss over a plot with yawning (literally) gaps, completely undeveloped characters whose narrative seems bipolar at times, and set ups which lead to dead ends rather than pay offs. The porcine husband (poor man, his inability to act is strikingly manifest in his first appearance as the hopeful promotee - he seems as enthusiastic as a man about to attend his own funeral) has bursts of rage which seem unresolved in the scene - in one of several examples, he disappears into his own room in deep funk after seeing his wife at her new sewing machine but soon after returns all sweet and light as if nothing happened. More important, the wife's reversal of her long held desire to return home is quickly and conveniently shoved in at the end - responding to the pleas of her rebellious daughter to stay in England she feels this is the one way she has of asserting herself.
It is the job of a film director to marshall large amounts of information into a meaningful proposition that makes sense, not to collapse in the face of overload. In the case of adapting novels, we expect the filmmakers to hone and refine and edit the original to capture an essence, the raison d'etre of the narrative.
BRICK LANE fails quite significantly. It does not explain why the story came into being nor does it give existence or even presence, to its characters. Its mise en scene is no different from the popular British soap opera (which displays much more social conscience) EAST ENDERS. Noticeably it fails to define the nature of the racist environment around the family in any personal way (and to add insult to injury we get the obligatory 9/11 shots on TV which they watch and realize that it could affect all Muslims).
But then the aim of the "well made film" tradition has always been to be inoffensive. BRICK LANE is as good an example of inoffensive, ineffectual and inconsequential cinema that you would find today.
