Far less complex than its source material, the 2003 novel by Monica
Ali, Brick Lane is all grace notes and no chords. Still, if it
doesn’t do justice to an exquisite book, it at least serves as a worthy
companion. Held up against such similar immigrant culture-shock tales
as the recent adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake,
Brick Lane appears thoughtful, even resonant. And the
cinematography (by Robbie Ryan) is gorgeous.
Married off at a tender age, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is
shipped from her home in Bangladesh into the fleshy embrace of her
London bureaucrat husband, Chanu (a glorious performance by Satish
Kaushik), and the intimidating bustle of the neighborhood around Brick
Lane in the East End. Chanu, who’s an avid but not particularly clever
reader of English literature, fancies himself overeducated for his line
of work. When he’s passed over for a promotion, he promptly quits.
Alarmed, Nazneen takes up piecework to keep the family afloat, but
Chanu is suspicious of women working, even inside the home. And it
turns out he has cause: The boy who brings Nazneen her cloth is turned
on by her cloistered existence, and soon they’re engaged in a
passionate affair, half sex and half post-9/11 political-religious
awakening.
Critics have complained that the pretty cinematography detracts from
Nazneen’s story—that it puts an artificial gloss on a drab,
working-class milieu, that its Bangladesh flashbacks are all color and
no content. But Brick Lane‘s tone is unusually intimate; every
frame is filtered through Nazneen’s perspective. Seen from this angle,
the Bangladesh footage has the unnerving jewel tones of nostalgia and
false memory, and indeed, Nazneen will soon be disillusioned by her
sister’s misleading account of her life there. And when the film finds
beauty in a working-class flat, it’s a sincere attempt at representing
the way a modest domestic existence can be willed into and out of
enchantment. The look of Brick Lane is like its comedy: broad,
but never inhuman.
