The OMG Movie Club

This month's movie was My Beautiful Laundrette.

South London, of the 1980's, the city being reconfigured by the Thatcherite “revolution” and the social tensions, and seen through the eyes of the Asian community My Beautiful Laundrette tells the story of the unlikely romance between a working-class British thug and a first-generation Pakistani entrepreneur.

Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is sent away by his disillusioned alcoholic father, still unable to get over his wife's suicide, to go work for Omar's Uncle Nasser, a successful businessman. Taking on the challenge Omar soon rises to accept Nasser's proposition that he begin his business career by reviving a down on its luck laundrette.

The laundrette offers all kinds of opportunities for Omar -- lucrative, romantic and ultimately, utopian. Enter Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis) when Johnny's skinhead street gang terrorized Omar's uncle Nasser. Johnny is a former friend with implications of more from their past. No matter how their re-acquaintance came about it is obvious there's still a palpable connection between Omar and Johnny. In fact, it's true love. Together they work to make the laundrette the best they can think it can be. Johnny helping Omar to manage and renovate the peeling walls, bubbling washers and useless public phone booth turning the forgotten and neglected in something beautiful. Much like they do for the other.




With a unconventionality, charm, wit, combined with a grittiness look it touches on virtually every thread of race, class, and capital in the British social fabric while telling a love story of two young men who are not only lovers and supposed adversaries in race, and class, finding themselves not belonging to anyone except each other.

Couple of thoughts:

Do Omar and Johnny truly fall in love for the first time this time? Or do they fall back in love? Rekindling something that once was either fleeting or maybe experimental phases in the their lives? Did they let themselves be open this time to the feelings before?

Do you think who does the wash and for whom and what can and cannot be washed and by the laundrette itself was symbolic of economic setting, social and sexual oppression, mobility and class, desire to dream, and potential equity?


My Beautiful Laundrette - British Film Guide