My Beautiful Laundrette By Stephen Frear - 1302 Words

Stephen Frear’s film, My Beautiful Laundrette portrays the struggle of intersecting sexuality, ethnicity, class, race and power. Omar, son of a Pakistani immigrant, is attracted to Johnny, a white English male. Their attraction and the subsequent relationship is looked down upon, both in England and Pakistan. Omar works for his uncle who lets him take over a laundrette in London while Johnny is initially unemployed and eventually works for Omar. Together, they make the laundrette a successful business venture and a place where they can freely express their desire for each other. The film seeks to highlight a progressive society in England during Margaret Thatcher’s entrepreneurship and opportunism era (Mohanram 1996). Britain†¦show more content†¦The accountants building is more like a watchdog and a representation of how the events that unfold inside and around the laundrette are all part of the new liberal Britain. Nasser refers to the laundrette as a place w here Omar can â€Å"use a little water to clear his brain.† What was crowding Omar’s mind when he was merely a young man waiting to go to college with seemingly nothing to bother him? The scene suggests the presence of something that â€Å"oppresses† Omar and the presence of the laundrette as a refuge, a place for him to â€Å"clear his brain†-a space where queer bodies can express their desire. The sounds of water in the background echoes this. Water is used to represent â€Å"cleansing, life, and freedom† in films (Shane Brown 2016). The sound of water in the laundrette becomes â€Å"a symbol of characters in stories handling difficult life scenarios, a symbol of power in stories and can free characters as well as claim them†(ibid). The laundrette is equivalent to what Gopinath describes as the diaspora-† a space of freedom† (Gopinath pg 14). In the next scene, I’m go ing to analyze, we see Johnny from a high angle shot, finishing the renovation the laundrette, now called Powders. The word powders can be translated to mean fine, dry particles produced by the grinding, crushing, or disintegration of a solid substance (Oxford Dictionary). Johnny and Omar canShow MoreRelatedMy Beautiful Laundrette By Hanif Kureishi And Directed By Stephen Frears1337 Words   |  6 Pages My Beautiful Laundrette, a 1985 film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, was heavily shaped by the surrounding social and economic climate taking place under Thatcherism. In the Thatcher era, an emphasis was put upon the return to Victorian values- including the encouragement of the self-made man, meaning that great importance was put upon individual interest as a opposed to communal ones. The government privatized industries that were formally nationalized. Inevitably, theRead MoreComparing Relationships, Stereotypes, and Identity Of Characters in Four Films1858 Words   |  7 Pagesbe realistic, nearly all films attempt to immerse in a world that is depicted convincingly on its own terms (Barsam 50). All four movies had contemporary settings at the time they were filmed. Eagle vs. Shark takes the viewer to New Zealand. My Beautiful Launderette was set in the economically-depressed area of south London in the mid-1980s. Another 1980s film, Moonstruck, took place in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. In the Heat of the Night was set in a small Mississippi town in the 1960s