Brick Lane

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Brick Lane is not one film, but two. Both are uniformly well acted and beautifully photographed, but only one is a compelling story.

The first film follows Nazneen Ahmed (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a Muslim girl from a small village outside Bangladesh who leaves her sister after her mother's death to marry an “educated man” living abroad in London, England. Flash forward 16 years later and (surprise!) Nazneen isn't living the life of a fairytale princess — her husband is an overweight caricature of the middle class that all-but waddled his way out of an Arthur Miller play, her daughters are petulant and she's forced to take a job as a seamstress in order to help pay off her husband's mounting debts. Along the way, she falls in love with the hunk of beefcake who comes to collect the jeans she sews every week (Christopher Simpson), and generally behaves in the fashion of all intelligent women struggling against embedded cultural patriarchy. After about an hour of this perfectly competent yet entirely unoriginal plotting, the second, far more interesting film begins.

Nazneen is walking toward beefcake (actual name “Karim”) in the street, smiling sweetly, when half a dozen men force their way between them and into a nearby pub. On the screen above the bar, the World Trade Center smoulders, and everyone gasps as a plane hits the second tower. Though any film that uses 9/11 as a plot device may get a deserved eye-roll from its audience, Brick Lane is one of the few that handles the subject with any delicacy. The event itself never gets another direct mention, and the film becomes a refreshingly even-handed look at a Muslim community's frantic search for identity and meaning in a world that despises it. Director Sarah Gavron manages to show Karim's slow descent into extremism without ever having a character use the word “fundamentalist,” and all of the old traditional conflicts presented in the first half of the film take on a fascinating texture in the new political climate.

Particularly notable is the change in character of Nazneen's husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik). In this second half of the film, he casts off all of his previous affectations of the antagonist and becomes the unwitting metaphor for the whole of the western Muslim community — he's confused, weak, vulnerable, afraid and yearns for nothing more than some kind of solidarity, some kind of certainty in his life. The level of sympathy Gavron is able to build for a man who was previously her villain is remarkable, though it's an easy argument to make that the character is entirely different after the 9/11 turning point — much like the film as a whole. Though it's disappointing that Gavron wasn't able to see exactly what it was that made her movie worthwhile from the beginning, half an average film plus half a good film still averages out better than most.