Brick Lane explores what it is to be a foreigner looking for the idyllic in a bleak world. Beautifully shot but lacking in depth.

Brick Lane (dir, Sarah Gavron, 2007)

Brick Lane conveys the story of a young girl from Bangladesh, who is shipped off to London when she is seventeen to marry an older ‘businessman’. Her life in Brick Lane, East London is spent dreaming of home where she played in freedom with her sister whilst running through the lush, green paddy fields of her home country.

Tannishtha Chatterjee gives a beautifully understated performance as Nazneen Ahmed, a woman forced into marriage because her culture, circumstance and religion deem it necessary. The stark, cold and anonymous life in London is far from the paradise of home, or at least the perceived paradise of home. Nazneen is regularly shot daydreaming about life away from London where she perceived everything as being perfect. The audience, however, is given a more realistic look in a brief glimpse showing the child's mother drowning herself for no apparent reason.

Brick Lane is a film about the rose tinted view many people have. Everything seems so much better from the other side of the fence, where life is not so perfect. Nazneen’s naïve assumption that life was idyllic back in Bangladesh is magnified by her blind realisation that her sister, who writes to her about love and her prince charming, is actually selling her body for sex. Nazneen appears to gloss over these facts until they are brashly shoved into her face.

Dreaming of love herself and not finding it in her overweight and underachieving husband, Nazneen falls for Karim (Christopher Simpson) whose good looks and street-wise attitude to life sweeps her off her feet. Again, she sees Karim through rose-tinted lenses, hoping he will give her the life she dreams of. Her realisation that he is not perfect soon invades her being and leaves her looking back to her husband for the heavenly existence she hungers for.

Mundane made Beautiful

Brick Lane succeeds in making what is mundane and common in everyday Britain seem very exotic indeed by viewing it through the eyes of an outsider. Nazneen is given the chance to sample Western clothing and the camera brushes over sequin tops that would appear tacky, but are transformed into beautiful and almost mysterious clothes through Nazneen’s eyes. What cinematographer Robbie Ryan does is paint the world through our protagonist’s point of view and suddenly the familiar is given a completely new look. It is quite an accomplishment and deserves credit for innovative use of the camera. The camera is a subtle observer of a foreigner’s world, invading on people’s privacy but always finding the beauty in the midst of ugliness.

Lack of Depth in Story Development

The film is subtle and gentle, but it fails to dig very deeply into the fascinating world of England’s multi-cultural society, where arranged marriages happen frequently in Islamic communities and post-9/11 prejudices often create bigoted generalisations about the Islamic religion. Too bad, because Brick Lane is a film that could cut to the heart of these issues.

In fact, the reasons for Nazneen’s affair and ending of it appear to connect with radical Islamic issues, but it is barely touched on. Karim’s transition from street trader to zealot are implied by his appearance, but nothing else, and Nazneen’s desire to distance herself from him are never made explicit.

On the whole, it feels like director Sarah Gavron did not want to engage with the subject matter and hoped the abstract would be enough. Unfortunately it leaves the film lacking in substance, though very beautifully shot.