“I love laundrettes, they’re so cinematic!”
It’s a bizarre set of words, but ones that, inexplicably, have left my mouth a number of times over the years. I have my justifications, of course. There’s 2017’s Baby Driver (dir. Edgar Wright), 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once (dir. Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert), a classic Ross and Rachel scene in season 1 of Friends, and the iconic 1985 Levi’s advert, in which a young Nick Kamen undresses inside the laundrette, throwing his jeans (and a bag of stones) right into the machine, and sitting down to wait in his underwear.
Then of course, we have My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. This 1985 classic tells a story of South London during the Thatcher years, with leads Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) working to do up a run-down laundrette and run it as a thriving business. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the film is currently being shown on the big screen at Pictureville.
The laundrette setting, with its dreamy powder blues and twinkling music, is the film’s centre. Washing machine doors are slammed in anger, cartoonish bubble sounds mark the transition between scenes, and amongst it all, a hard but beautiful story unfolds.
Equal parts romantic and confronting, My Beautiful Laundrette remains a landmark both in queer, and British-Asian cinema. There’s so much in this film we recognise in the world around us, ugly and beautiful alike. What makes My Beautiful Laundrette so enrapturing though, is the unusual way it balances these things. Queerness, as far as we can see, is the least of Omar and Johnny’s concerns. It’s certainly the least controversial thing about their relationship: a romance between a second-generation Pakistani immigrant, and his childhood friend, a reforming ex-National Front member.
Their situational stakes are obviously high, but it’s not the emotionally fraught and heavily resisted romance of Brokeback Mountain (2004. Ang Lee), or even God’s Own Country (2017. Francis Lee) – this tender and moving love story, set in the rolling hills of West Yorkshire, is also being screened at Pictureville soon. Omar and Johnny, in spite of everything stacked against them, know exactly how they feel about one another from the start. The lack of a big, catastrophic reveal is a resistance of its own kind.
The story is filled with moments of intimacy so blatant they could only go unnoticed. And they are more and more audacious each time. When Johnny and Omar first reconnect and arrange to call, there are hungry eyes and flirtatious smiles in the middle of Johnny’s thuggish mates and Omar’s scariest uncle. When Johnny’s racist old crowd watch Johnny and Omar working together with aggressive disapproval, the two embrace, and Johnny licks Omar’s neck, just barely out of view. His wicked smile is defiant. It screams, if only you knew.
Later, Omar’s uncle is spinning his mistress round the laundrette, talking resolutely of his plan to marry Omar off, while feet away Omar makes love to his boyfriend behind an artfully placed two-way mirror. Then – in what I consider to be the film’s most iconic moment – Johnny spits celebratory champagne directly into Omar’s mouth. It’s disarming and beautiful to see two men so in love and with so little fear of being caught. When Omar’s uncle walks in on them hastily dressing, it’s amusement, not anxiety, that fills their half-formed explanations.
The laundrette itself has a romantic essence. It’s a place where customers quietly dance, late on into the evening. It’s gorgeous neon sign ignites a dreary street. Our leads come there to reconcile, again and again.
Of course, it contradicts itself. Omar’s laundrette wants to represent sanitised aspiration and an immigrant’s dream of success, but in the end, even when it tries to be ‘The Ritz’, the laundrette remains what it’s always been. A place where all life and love pass through. Mundanity, hardship, family drama and reconciliation. A simple but charming picture of reality.
40 years on from its original release, the film’s potentially dating elements add charm rather than detract from it. There’s the grain of the film stock, a matter-of-fact line delivery that risks sounding stilted to modern ears, and in one scene, a camera rig visible in a reflection for no short amount of time. Most charming of all, of course, are Daniel Day-Lewis’s frosted tips, a bleach job just horrendous enough to be wonderful.
The film’s uncomfortable parts, tragically, don’t feel particularly dated at all. There’s violence, greed and plenty of racial slurs. The film doesn’t pretend to be okay with these things, but it knows they’re there, and knows just when to jar us with harsh reality.
The depiction of South Asian characters in My Beautiful Laundrette is also varied and complex. British-Pakistani characters drink and smoke, even flash one another through windows. Some are kind and deeply thoughtful, like Omar’s alcoholic father, who becomes a voice of wisdom and liberal reason. Others, like Omar’s uncle Salim, are greedy, even criminal. Uncle Nasser’s affair with Rachel is full of love, if barely kept secret. These portrayals still feel poignant, reflecting a wide diversity of experience. They loudly defy stereotypes in a way that seems even less common today.
My Beautiful Laundrette has no neat conclusion. It’s apt, because as we’ve seen in the 40 years since, there is no neat end to racial prejudice and class division. The film does, however, end with hope. With every brutal challenge, something sweet between Omar and Johnny prevails. Tenderness over violence. Mutual connection over past betrayal. As the closing image, of Johnny and Omar splashing one another with water, spins away and the bubble sounds ring off, we hope that the two of them can stay that way, if nothing else does.