Idle Daniel Day-Lewis completism. Directed by Stephen Frears off a script by Hanif Kureishi.
A character-driven portrait of the Pakistani community of south London, some of whom are thriving in the early years of Thatcherism. The titular laundrette is next door to a "turf accountant". Main character Omar (I mostly heard "Omo", played by Gordon Warnecke) is encouraged by his leftist/intellectual/journalist/dipso father (Roshan Seth, surely a shoo-in for a subcontinental Doctor Who) to work for his entrepreneurial uncle (Saeed Jaffrey, The Man Who Would Be King (1975)) between school and university. The young man turns out to have a strong business drive and ability to tame notionally-wild punk/fascist Johnny (Day-Lewis) which is to say he can get actual work out of a no-hope, uneducated, lower-class white boy, perhaps because they're lovers. Shaping proceedings are Derrick Branche's Salim, a greasy drug dealer who is the actual source of the family's wealth, and dissolute daughter Rita Wolf, just waiting for her life to start. Shirley Anne Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) played the British trophy mistress. Things inevitably go all Do the Right Thing (1989).
Despite the good work of the actors this lacks the unity of vision of a Mike Leigh or social realism of a Ken Loach. Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, etc. would have done a stretch in those squats when they fled to the mother country. The focus on the well-connected in the Pakistani community (poor though some relatives may be) coming into contact with people Britain could no longer deport to the colonies is well-worn; some scenes directly appealed to A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I never felt that Johnny was as dangerously, unstably violent as Stephen Graham's Combo was in This is England (2006). The racism is far more muted than in Romper Stomper (1992). Overall it lacked teeth.
The cinematography is drab, evoking the English climate of course, and countless TV soap operas.
Roger Ebert: three stars. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Complementary to Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984), etc. Excess details at Wikipedia.
