London. Omar is a Pakistani migrant living in a shabby apartment with his father, Hussein, a broke left-wing journalist. Luckily, Omar's uncle Nasser, a businessman, is there to help: after a job at a car wash, he gives Omar a laundrette to manage, and hopes he can arrange a marriage with Tania with him. But Omar is gay and meets his former lover, Englishman Johnny, who was a member of a far-right anti-immigrant group. Omar and Johnny smuggle drugs for Salim, hidden inside a fake beard, and thus gain money to renovate the laundrette which becomes a hit. Nasser has a mistress, Rachel, but his wife makes a potion that gives Rachel a skin rash, so she leaves Nasser. Tania leaves Omar. Thugs ambush and attack Salim in the laundrette, and beat up Johnny who protected him. Omar and Johnny splash each other in the sink.
"My Beautiful Landurette" is all over the place, and yet, this mess gives it that feeling of genuine 'slice-of-life' that makes it realistic even today. It tackles several themes (Pakistani-British relations, lives of immigrants, gay people), but they are always in the background, since the script just takes a funny and witty "proper" observation on life in general, centering around Omar trying to find a job and grow up. The best performances were delivered by Daniel Day-Lewis as Omar's business (and gay love) partner Johnny, and the underrated, excellent Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey as Omar's wealthy uncle Nasser, who senses he can always make a business from the "dirty", undesirable jobs Londoners don't want to do: "There's money in the muck!" This is a sly jab at capitalism and Thatcherism, since Nasser plans to use the capacity of the lower class of Pakistani migrants to catapult himself into the upper class. As he explains to Omar: "You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system." Several of these subplots are introduced, but subsequently not that fully developed, which comes off as a flaw: the sudden attack of the far-right thugs on Salim at the laudnrette feels almost as an "imposter" in the film; it wasn't explained why Johnny was one of their members; some of Johnny's peculiar behavioral quirks are unexplained (he suddenly leaves with Tania in the rain, drives on the bicycle and crashes back into the house).
Even Johnny's and Omar's relationship was not that clearly written. They have one (almost) sex scene in the laudnrette's office before they are interrupted, with one unusual detail (while lying on top, Johnny takes a sip from the champagne bottle, kisses Omar, and then lifts his head up to "flow" champagne from his mouth into Omar's), but otherwise their emotional bond is not sensed that much. Omar sees him more as a business partner and acts distanced and cold towards him, an thus their final scene is not earned. The director Stephen Frears shows a lot of sense for depiction of people of that milieu (Omar is smiling watching Tania showing him her breasts outside the window of the living room, behind the backs of Nasser and his friends sitting and talking) and even has some creative camera drives (one fantastic one appears some 83 minutes into the film, as the crane lifts the camera up to the rooftop of the laundrette, showing a thug with a club on top, and then the camera descends on the other side, back to the street), showing that the rather abrupt and incomplete ending had much more potentials. It doesn't matter, since there is some energy and likeability in the film that makes it almost invincible to flaws: it is a meditation of contradictions found everywhere in life, including that a local Englishman works for an immigrant, but it does so with a lot of sense for feeling alive.
Grade:+++
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