brick lane – will it be  the beginning of a  new conversation?

Let’s face it. Monica Ali did not write Brick  Lane to bring out an image of the  community that western audiences are not  used to imagining.  She highlighted the  stereotypes with some broad brush strokes and no intention to look for nuances.  The  settings she portrayed are probably cliché for us  Bangladeshis.  However, to unsuspecting Anglo Saxon  eyes, it is a newly discovered picture of the closed  world of those people who famously brought curry to  their lives.  Since moving to London four years ago,  my interaction with East London has been frequent  through my community work, but still not enough to  say that I am an insider.  However, I am close enough  to understand the undercurrents and different  dynamics that grip the community.  There are so many  layers and so many different political dynamics in this  community that fitting it all in a canvas of broad brush strokes would seem too crass, especially for the  people who belong there.  Monica Ali unconvincingly  did exactly that, only to get the scorn of the commu­nity.   Little did she care, as the book went on to  become short listed for the Man Booker prize amid  wide adulation from the English critics. Never in the  history of Britain has there been a book that has been  received with so many cheers and jeers at the same  time.  To turn that book into a sensitive film would  have been no mean task, even for many seasoned  screenwriters and directors.  But Sarah Gavron’s first  feature film Brick Lane not only handles that job deftly, it also introduces some tough questions for today’s  Britain in its uniquely understated way.

Just as the haunting French background score  blends in perfectly with the rich photography from  rural Bengal, this story of Nazneen transcends the  geographical boundary of its characters.  This could  be the story of any immigrant in any landscape. 

Director Gavron successfully manages to make it  more about the journey of one woman rather than  making a heavy social commentary about race  relations or the status of women in South Asian  society.   This is precisely what makes it a tender and  humane film acted with utmost sweetness.  It won’t  shatter any prejudices or stereotypes, but what it will  do is make people think twice about the characters  that they see so regularly in the streets of East  London. Brick Lane is the story of Nazneen (Tanishtha  Chatterjee) who, leaving behind a beloved younger  sister, arrives in London from Bangladesh at 18 for an  arranged marriage to an older man, Chhanu (Satish  Kaushik).  Tanishtha practically carries the film with  her understated and beautiful portrayal of Nazneen. 

Even though Brick Lane is all about her struggles,  transformation and eventually getting liberated, the  main surprises of the film are the two male characters  — Chhanu, the overbearing and often insecure much  older husband of Nazneen, and Karim, the young and  rebellious second generation British Bangladeshi who  falls in love with Nazneen.  The story does not make  any judgment on the characters, nor does it make any  black and white representation of their lives. Rather, it  quietly sets up the context of different social and  political changes as a trigger for various transforma­tions that the characters go through.

Although much of the transformation that  Kareem’s character goes through is clearly depicted,  much remains unsaid and open to the audience’s  interpretation.  Christopher Simpson puts up a  fantastic act of a Confused-East-London-Born-and­Brought-up-British-Bangladeshi-Boy with amazing  aplomb.  The swagger, the fake self-confidence and  the couple of lines of Bangla with Syheti accent were  simply amazing.  The identity crisis of today’s East  London-based deshi youth who often see themselves  as the victim of racial and systemic discrimination is  very real.  Similarly real is their tendency to embrace  political Islam as the answer to this injustice. This  choice is as much a reaction to discrimination as it is a  revolt against their parents’ generation, whose  provincial Bangladeshi fixations and politics their  children can barely relate to.

Chhanu’s character is very much representative of  this older generation that is stuck in a limbo.  As  Chhanu recites Tagore and often reminisces of his  days in Bangladesh, his teenage children hardly care or  can relate.  As I hear recent interviews in local Bangla  TV of hundreds of people getting swindled by money  transferring agents while sending money to build their  dream homes back in Bangladesh, the stories of lost  immigrant souls like Chanu are depressingly real. 

Caught between the two worlds, they want to hang on  to their past desperately only to avoid confronting the  present.  The end result is a rude awakening which  often does not have a happy ending.  film. An American friend not so familiar with the  context was bothered by the fact that there were not  enough dramatic elements to cause the transformation  of Nazneen. The British friend, who first got a taste  of the Asian subculture reading Ali’s book, thought  the movie left out a lot from the book. But most of  the Bangladeshis I talked to, who had been perturbed  at Ali’s lack of depth in portraying the characters in  the book, were happy at the outcome of the film,  which they thought gave some contexts to the  characters.  Lines from the book such as “[Nazneen’s  mother] had been ripening like a mango on a tree”  might seem exotic to Westerners, but had a hard time  pleasing any Bangladeshi with good sense.   The  criticism of the outsider status of the book’s author  was equally, if not more applicable with regards to the  film’s main cast, director, and screenwriter. However,  this was tackled cleverly.  The movie’s message focused less on one specific culture and more on one  woman’s journey to freedom.  That is where the all­women team of the main creative partners — the  writer, the screenplay writer and the director — could  have perhaps all identified with the subject of the film.  In tackling the issue of authenticity of the  characters, the director decided to have a strong  assistant director in Ruhul Amin, who was born and  brought up in the local community.  The research that  went into the film also clearly showed.  Starting from the characters costumes to the sets, there was hardly  anything that I could find fault with.  Although the  casting of Bollywood actor Satish Kaushik to play  Chhanu raised some eyebrows among the native Bangla speakers for his Hindi-accented Bangla  pronunciation, his acting ability in portraying the  struggle and denials of this complex character hid that  weakness well. The movie shooting, however, was still  met with strong suspicion.  It was greeted with  community protests, newspaper articles and a column  fight between leading intellectuals among other things. 

vocal lobby from the community held rallies and  said the film portrayed the community in a negative  light.  Blogs were buzzing with some of these  protestors calling the film a conspiracy by non-Sylheti  Bangladeshis to hurt the Sylheti community’s restau­rant business in Brick Lane.  Journalists pointed out  that there were only two women in a protest rally of  about 70 people.  Perhaps, that number is a preview to  how this film will be greeted among the community — by complete ignorance.   I doubt many of the real  Nazneens will have a chance to see this film, and that  may not be out of choice.  However, beyond all the  chatter and controversy and mock protests, for the  people who understood the nuances of this little gem  of a film, it ought to be the starting point of a new  dialogue — both inside and outside the British  Bangladeshi society.   The ever widening gap between identity crisis among today’s young British  Bangladeshis, which is often making them take shelter  in political Islam, is a crisis that is haunting main­stream Britain.  The communities are more ghettoized  than ever before.   Lack of trust between racial groups  is at an all time high, and it seems there is no end in  sight.  The film can be the eginning of a conversa­tion about these different cultures opening up to each  other — not with a patronizing attitude, but more with a view towards bridging the ever increasing gap  by giving some context to the stereotypes often made  in the society.

For people living inside the Tower Hamlets  Borough, the majority of them Bangladeshis, this  film’s main take away remains the state of women, the  often neglected segment that gets regularly sidelined  and overlooked in that society.   In a recent survey  commissioned by the government sponsored NHS, it  was shown that a large segment of Bangladeshi  women from the borough suffers various forms of  chronic mental depression and a large segment is not  even aware of it.   Yet, like Nazneen, these women  quietly go on with their day-to-day lives, pulling in  more than their fair share in the household.  The  dialogue needs to start and it should start now —  before it’s too late.  The criticism and threat of violent  protests by a vocal minority has also raised questions  about how and by whom, we, as British Bangladeshis,  like to be represented in the mainstream media. In the first week of their release, Bollywood mega  films Om Shanti Om and Sawaria far surpassed Brick  Lane in the box office.  However disappointing that  may sound, the silver lining lies elsewhere.  As part of  a focus group audience, I saw the many months earlier  with a select group of British-Bangladeshis.  At the  end of the film, director Sarah Gavron asked us all  pointed questions to get a sense of whether the film  was realistic.  Amid everyone’s laughter, a young  thirty-something woman said that the most unrealistic  part of the film was the lack of cooking shown in a  film set in a Bangladeshi household.  She then  animatedly described how it reminded her of her  younger years spent at the council flats of Tower  Hamlets.  She went on to very articulately explain  many other typical restrictions that the women faced in the council.  Months later, when I saw that same  face on TV in a live television show, I immediately  ecognized her.  It was Rowshan Ara — the nominee  from the Labour Party for the Parliamentary Elections. The emancipation of the Nazneens of Brick Lane may not happen in the near future.  But they now have a voice to represent them in main­stream politics.  This new stream of second genera­tion politicians are now representing that hope — a  hope that one day it will be possible to convert the  dialogue generated by Brick Lane into noise — a noise  that will be loud enough to break some long shut  windows.   And that’s no mean achievement for a film.

Let’s face it. Monica Ali did not write Brick  Lane to bring out an image of the  community that western audiences are not  used to imagining.  She highlighted the  stereotypes with some broad brush strokes and no intention to look for nuances.  The  settings she portrayed are probably cliché for us  Bangladeshis.  However, to unsuspecting…