As Stephen Frears’ 1985 dramedy turns 40, a writer discovers a hopeful mirror in the lovers at the centre of the film.
My partner and I headed from the suburbs into the city to attend a 40th anniversary screening of My Beautiful Laundrette, a film neither of us had seen despite always intending to. Directed by Stephen Frears and written by Hanif Kureishi, this TV-movie-turned-sleeper-success is considered by many to be a cult classic and an early paragon of queer representation, meaning it necessarily carries the burden of fixed opinions and critical interpretations. It seemed there was no room to think about it for ourselves, so we put it off until it appeared at the cinematheque.
What surprised me most about the film, which I’d assumed centred around Daniel Day-Lewis’ Johnny Burfoot – who a friend understandably claims as her first cinematic crush – is the taciturn protagonist, Omar. Played by Gordon Warnecke, who the Times critic Vincent Canby called “wonderfully insidious,” Omar, when we first encounter him, is conscientiously washing clothes by hand and hanging them out to dry on the balcony of his father’s “black hole of a flat.” For a long time, he doesn’t speak, but we keenly observe him.
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As we hear, instead, from his perpetually-inebriated father, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), his savvy, philosophizing uncle Hussein (Roshan Seth) and his disagreeable cousin Salim (Derrick Branche), Omar is, as Roger Ebert said, “the blank slate,” a sponge, assuming their influence as he stirs out of a stupor– his immature outsiderdom – and transforms into a man of consequence.
“The way the script was written had very…actually no dialogue for Omar in the beginning,” Warnecke told me over email. “That enabled the viewer to see the way I reacted to what was going on around me. Sometimes, a look or non-verbal reaction can say much more than words.” The first time he speaks, at drinks with Hussein and his mistress Rachel (Shirley Ann Field), Omar discloses a personal vision: “If I pick up Papa and squeezed him… I often imagine I’d get a pure bottle of pure vodka.” The word “squeeze” recurs throughout the film, whether from Nasser, who complains Omar’s squeezing of shirts doesn’t stretch him, or Hussein, who says of succeeding in Britain, “You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.”
Kureishi’s script thinks in these terms: stretch and squeeze; rub and tug; hard and soft’ screw and unscrew. The world is a tangible, malleable thing, and Omar, who an uncle says is “the future”,is an embodiment of all these sensibilities. “If you take [squeeze] literally,” Warnecke says to me, “it is almost a metaphor of what the government was doing to the people of Britain at the time. Come to think of it, they were ‘squeezing’ them and ‘rinsing’ them. Rather like clothes. It’s about putting pressure and getting something out of something or someone.”
Over time, as he cleans cars at Hussein’s garage, unknowingly traffics drugs for Salim, and inevitably inherits the titular laundrette that he will successfully re-invent and ultimately make his name, he applies the pressure to himself to sharpen his look and learn to speak up for himself. “I’m not going to be beat down by this country,” Omar says to Johnny –and we believe him. Perhaps it is only those who refuse the constraints placed on them, by birth or by circumstance, to make something of themselves, to strive for a sort of life where renovation results in regeneration, that ambitious dreams like Omar’s can become actual possibilities.
Of Omar, Gordon, who played Nasser in a stage adaptation of the film in 2024, told me: “Back then he took stock of what and who was around him. He saw his father was beaten by the system and did not want to make the same mistakes. He was a progressive entrepreneur who wanted to better himself. He had seen how his father had battled the racists and how his father was bitter and angry not only with himself but society as a whole… Omar went the other way.”
The way that Johnny is weaved into Omar’s narrative is that he appears in the film’s prologue, a memory that fades away the longer we don’t return to it. But during a racist attack, accompanied by a gang of fascists in an underpass, his presence causes Omar to exit his car,the same way that working for his uncle gets him “outta the house.” As Omar, grinning, advances towards Johnny, followed in cinematographer Olivier Stapleton’s elegant tracking shot and bathed in a dreamy score produced by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer, it is as though he is the antidote to the world trying to do you in, a beacon of hope from the dulling darkness of modern existence.
That juxtaposition – between the tensions of their lives and the pleasures that each other’s presence respectively brings— – is repeated throughout the film as the stakes, and subplots, continue to converge: whether it’s aAfter Omar has been attacked by Salim, while receiving a lecture from his father, and Johnny’s phone call overrides the dread; or their silent, glowing kiss in the shadows, interrupted by an attack on the laundrette; or even on opening day at the laundrette, when their heated, champagne-sodden love-making is contrasted with a classical heterosexual pair, a bond which will soon break, on the other side of the one-way glass (“Daniel improvised the pouring champagne into my mouth,” Gordon said. “A brilliant invention.”).
The intimacy of their bond is expressed in an accumulation of private gestures: the way Omar wants to remove an eyelash from Johnny’s face, or the scene when the men embrace and Johnny sticks his tongue out to lick behind Omar’s ear. Much attention has been paid to the tongue, but how about the nape of the neck, as the wet trace of it dries up? In these brief, blushing instances, Omar manages to get out of his mind and deliver him back into his body.
“Let’s open,” Johnny says after buttoning up their shirts: “The whole world is waiting.”
The most moving scene – and one which I’ve returned to since – is when, after the laundrette opens and Omar stands on the other side of the glass watching the neighbourhood file in. It is only his back that we see, but he seems to be radiating pride, his dream realised. Johnny comes up to the glass and peers in so that, for a moment, their reflections transpose and form a new kind of face: one that is neither white or brown, rich or poor, dirty or clean. It’s optimistic.
I wish I could say that after the screening of My Beautiful Laundrette my partner and I gushed about the film. I wish I could say we both felt it was a mirror of our relationship, and that this sense of identification brought us closer together. In reality, we were tired, hungry, and found ourselves stuck in unmoving traffic, which only further served to inflame our moods. I placed my hand on his; he cast it aside. A miscommunication had taken place – all it takes is a single moment for someone to feel disrespected – the kind that just so happens to occur in the film.
After opening day, when Salim informs Johnny that Omar, drunk as his father, intends to marry Tania (Rita Wolf), it causes Johnny to flee into the night. “I don’t want to see you for a while,” Omar tells him after locating him. “I have some big thinking to do.” His partner, without whom his dream wouldn’t have come true, has become a distraction, a heavy, sullied load.
“Sometimes I hate myself so much I don’t want anyone to like me,” my partner later said to me. “I don’t want to rely on you too much.” To actively love someone is to constantly be recalibrating your attachment with and to them, which will result in instances of unalignment and disagreements. But the film does not present this aspect as a sign of unhealthiness, of root rot, but the fragile nature of any bond, which can, at any moment, for no reason at all, be sent overbalance. The image that remains in my mind is after Johnny is attacked by his comrades and Omar holds his shivering, bloodied face in his hands, but he refuses his assistance, since, for some, like my partner, running away from conflict is second nature. “I couldn’t even pin you down then,” Omar says, referring to their school days. In the world of My Beautiful Laundrette, two people of disparate backgrounds only self-actualise once they work together.
“You’re dirty,” Omar says to Johnny: “You’re beautiful.” The laundrette of the title, then, becomes two-fold: the site of capitalist possibility and this dashing, white face: the enterprise and a sentimental education. At the end of the film, shirtless and facing each other, the lovers playfully scoop up handfuls of soapy water to cleanse the other, but we know what follows this will be yet another instance that interrupts but never truly threatens their queer optimism. Dirt is perpetual in the business of making blank slates. The door to the back room closes, giving their intimate spectacle some privacy. The only thing left for them – for us – to do is to repeat the cycle of a shared ambition.
