Contents

1.  Introduction  3

2.  Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi.  3

3.  My beautiful Laundrette.  5

4.  The Representation of Pakistanis in My beautiful Laundrette  6

4.1.  The adult Pakistanis  6

4.2.  The adolescent Pakistanis.  10

5.  Conclusion.  11

6.  Bibliography  13

7.  Filmography  14

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1. Introduction

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represented by cinematic devices. How are outsiders or foreigners represented in a movie? How do cinematic devices, e.g. shots, narration, camera movements, cuts, mise-en-scène (setting, lighting, costumes, actors), sound and genre-expectations lead to a special kind of descriptions of minorities?

The aim of this written paper is to find out how a special group of foreigners, the Pakistanis, are represented in the movie My beautiful Laundrette. Are there any hints that they are shown as the prejudices of the English in the 80s, especially the young ones, see them? Or does the director take side with the Pakistanis? In order to find out how the movie works, one has to start with its author, Hanif Kureishi. His autobiographical elements contributed much to the narration.

2. Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi

Almost everyone was bullied once in a while as a child, but in Hanif Kureishi’s case, it was a kind of leitmotif that passed through his entire childhood. His father is a Pakistani, his mother is English, and he grew up in England. Being born in 1954, he had to bear insults and attacks by children, young people and even his teachers almost every day. As a consequence, he was so ashamed of his origins that he tried to deny his roots, underlined by the fact that he could not find an identity in a country which was his home, England, but which could never feel quite like his real home.

In his youth he read many books about the civil rights movement in the USA and listened to many speeches of Malcolm X. He did not agree with his attitudes; in his opinion total separation was not the solution concerning the integration of minorities in a foreign country.

It was in that time that he made the acquaintance of a boy who later developed into the direction that Johnny did in My beautiful Laundrette. Many of his traits were used to create the character that was played by Daniel Day Lewis. As a he was an offspring of a rich family, he had no problems with money; once in a while he visited his wealthy uncles in Pakistan to find out more about his

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origins ¹ . There he soon recognised that he felt the Englishman in him, even if he lead a hard life in England. Apart from that, he always had the feeling of belonging to two different worlds, and he could not decide which one should be his home. In spite of his scepticism about religion, he carefully analysed one of its main topics, the holiness of family virtues; he compared the British family life to that of the Pakistanis and found advantages and disadvantages in both of them:

[In Pakistan], all day there were

Ironically he realised that in Pakistan as well as in Britain, he was not considered a Pakistani, but a “Paki” which served as a kind of four-letter word in GB, i.e. he was not taken seriously. In England, his rich uncles despised the poor Pakistanis the same way the conservative English did. Kureishi felt forsaken even by the Labour Party which, on the one hand, wanted to integrate Asians as well as Blacks, but on the other hand, it did not want to lose more votes they got from the racist electors.

Soon Hanif Kureishi discovered his ability in creative writing; his early plays deal with the situation of young Asians in England. Being unsatisfied with the limited audience he reached, he decided to write for the screen and got an offer from Channel 4. The script for My beautiful Laundrette was his first work for television and had to be rewritten four or five times. The film was shot on 16-mm film during February and March in 1985 and cost about $ 850,000. When it was

¹ These rich uncles were transformed into Omar’s relatives in the movie.

² Kureishi, Hanif, My beautiful Laundrette and The Rainbow Sign (London, 1986).

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released at the end of 1985, critics all over the world highly acclaimed this debut of a young author; they always focused on the importance of the brilliant screenplay by Kureishi who had put a lot of autobiographical elements into the story. Even Hollywood honoured the script by nominating it for an Oscar. The actors were well-chosen, especially Daniel Day Lewis who began his career with this movie. Famous Indian actor Roshan Seth played Papa, Nasser was portrayed by Saeed Jaffrey, and Omar by Gordon Warnecke. The collaboration between director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Kureishi promised to be fruitful, and so they decided to start another project in 1988 which resulted in Sammy and Rosie get laid.

3. My beautiful Laundrette

In the 1980s, young Pakistani Omar (Gordon Warnecke) takes over a decaying laundrette in London from his uncle Nasser (Saeed Jeffrey), who has achieved his social rise with brutal deals. He begins his work with his school friend Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), an unemployed Englishman. Johnny is regarded suspiciously by his former companions, who represent radical fascism against Asians. In spite of all problems, including those by Omar’s family members like Salim (Derrick Branche), they have financial success and even fall in love with each other.

The movie is constantly shot from Omar’s point of view; Johnny may be the second protagonist, but the spectator never gets any information about his family or his professional background; the only thing that is certain is that he has turned into a radical fascist when he was a teenager.

As the film focuses on Omar, many aspects of his everyday life are portrayed in detail; he lives in a small, shabby flat, together with his father, called “Papa” (Roshan Seth), whose only activity is drinking and sleeping, but he used to be a successful journalist and writer a long time ago. Omar’s uncles are far richer: Papa’s brother Nasser is a wealthy entrepreneur, and Salim, another relative, cares for the liability of the business. Nasser has a lover, Rachel (Shirley Ann Field), and betrays his wife Bilquis (Charu Bala Choksi), and his daughter Tania (Rita Wolf), Omar’s cousin, wants to break free from old family values. This is the basic frame of the story. There were many demonstrations against the movie by Pakistanis when it was released. As Kenneth C. Kaleta writes:

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