"Brick Lane" is a beautiful movie. Moving from Bangladeshi fields to the crowded tenements of London's East End, the film is absolutely drenched with fascinating visual images. But as the plot unfolds, it becomes apparent that director Sarah Gavron also finds attractive people more sympathetic, and this is "Brick Lane's" undoing.
The story owes a great deal to both Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" (and Steven Spielberg's overwrought adaptation) and Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter," and evokes nearly every Bollywood cliché without any of the joy. At 17, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is forced into an arranged marriage with Chanu (the wonderful Satish Kaushik), an older man living in London. She bears two daughters and struggles to raise them while taking on sewing work after Chanu loses his job.
Over the years, the miserable woman has been writing to her love-starved sister Hasina, whose letters describe her many love affairs, as she constantly seeks the true love that eludes Nazneen.
Nazneen eventually falls for a hunky young man named Karim (the rugged Christopher Simpson), who is politically active in Muslim affairs in London. Karim is an attentive lover, nice to look at, active where her husband appears passive, thin where Chanu is fat, and might just be the answer to Nazneen's prayers.
And yet it is poor Chanu who emerges as the dominant character in "Brick Lane." It doesn't help that Nazneen is a terribly weak and directionless character, and Karim's activism seems tacked on and without real depth. Chanu is an educated though not employable man, a Bangladeshi Willy Loman aching over the fact that he is out of touch with both society and his family. In the end, we yearn to know more about Chanu, and less about his more picture-perfect costars.
