AIRLESS, earnest and sludgy with banalities, the Brit drama “Brick Lane” wraps a sari around the kind of suffering-housewife picture that became a cliché 30 years ago.
Nazneen, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in London near the famous alley of South Asian eateries called Brick Lane, is a sighing, oppressed woman – all sad gazes and nostalgic letters to her sister back home – enduring an arranged marriage to her blundering husband, Chanu. Enter one liberated neighbor, a new friend who is all but stamped a Modern Woman by her cigarettes, her short haircut and her self-owned seamstress business.
As though this is the first time she’s ever encountered female immigrants working in London, Nazneen, who has lived there for 16 years, begins to allow her individuality to blossom by taking in home sewing jobs. Naturally, she begins exchanging shy-but-smoldering glances with Karim, the strapping youth who delivers clothes to her.
If you have a book with you or a few phone calls to make, it might be wise to skip the next half hour or so, which trundles along on rusty rails while we wait for Nazneen and Karim to hook up. The film is strangely fascinated by its predictable situations and stock characters. The crude husband makes loveless love to Nazneen, and her two interchangeable daughters are the most obvious possible figures, modern young women who sass their dad and correct his English.
Those looking for the boiling multiculti pandemonium of, say, Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” will be disappointed by the mildewed story and the glum claustrophobia of the sets. The acting, however, especially by the quietly effective Tannishtha Chatterjee in the lead, is far better than in last year’s even sudsier immigrant drama “The Namesake.”
“Brick Lane” almost redeems itself with a more complex – and much improved – third act, in which Nazeen has to measure the value of the horizontal tune-ups her delivery man is giving her against the shadow of political radicalism, her mixed feelings about returning to her sister in the old country, and possible hidden depths in her churlish husband.
As is usual in women’s infidelity pictures, Nazneen never shows any sense of guilt, though. To hint that a heroine might have any flaws whatsoever would be just a bit too modern for this picture.
BRICK LANE
Mild ingredients.
Running time: 101 minutes. Rated PG-13 (tame sex scene, brief profanity). At the Lincoln Plaza, the Sunshine.