HOMEWARD
BOUND
by
Chris Dashiell
Remembering the happiness of the past can make the pain
and difficulties of the present that much harder to bear. In Brick
Lane, the debut feature from director Sarah Gavron, the
past is in Bangladesh, where a teenager named Nazneen played with her
little sister, from whom she was inseparable. But their happiness was
shattered by their mother’s suicide, and Nazneen was sent to London
for an arranged marriage, while her sister was left behind.
The title
Brick Lane comes from a street in a Bengali Muslim neighborhood
of east London—it is twenty years later, and Nazneen (Tannishtha
Chatterjee) lives there with her family. Her husband (Satish Kaushik),
who is overweight and appears to be much older than she, quits his job
because he failed to get a promotion, then embarks on a series of foolish
money-making schemes. Her two daughters have difficulty reconciling
the traditional ways they’ve learned at home with the more culturally
open ways they encounter in British schools. Nazneen is shy and retiring,
isolated within the small world of her flat and her family, with her
one pleasure the correspondence she has with her sister, and her greatest
desire is to go back home and see her. But when she starts to work as
a seamstress at home for extra income, the young man who delivers the
clothes, Karim (Christopher Simpson) shows interest in her, and for
the first time she feels real passion for a man.
The
script is adapted from a novel by Monica Ali, and the book’s wide-ranging
concerns are pared down to the personal drama of this seemingly traditional
Muslim wife. Chatterjee's beautifully expressive eyes and emotional
vulnerability bring her character vividly to life. The conflicting powers
of tradition, fear, hope in the unknown, and finally courage, are seen
clearly at play within this character’s mind and heart, and one
of the film’s best qualities is that it honors the story of a
shy, hesitating, ordinary immigrant woman as worthy of our regard.
Gavron
and her cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, create an imaginative visual landscape
within the confines of a London flat, with windows, doorways, and halls
signaling the elusive wonder of the outside world, just out of reach.
The story touches on sociopolitical realities after 9/11, when Karim
becomes an activist for Muslim pride, but the real focus is on Nazneen's
inner turmoil, the struggle between grief for a lost home and childhood,
an inchoate yearning for personal freedom, and her genuine love for
her family, all of which is crystallized by the character of the troubled
teenage daughter Shahana (Naeema Begum).
There
was a negative reaction against the novel (and the film), from British
Muslims, because of Ali's complex, rather unconventional take on racial
tensions in London. On the other side, critics have tended to slight
the film for avoiding the novel's sociopolitical depth, and for its
romantic tone. In my opinion, they saddle the picture with unfair expectations.
It is precisely the isolation and social awkwardness of Nazneen, an
apolitical person trapped between two worlds, that makes her story so
worth telling, and so moving. The drama of ordinary people need not
be neglected through a contrived quest for relevance. This story builds
steadily and believably, and takes some remarkable, unexpected turns
along the way. To resolve our feelings about the past, it turns out,
may involve turning our attention to those who need our love now.
*
Canadian
filmmaker Guy Maddin might not like having his work characterized as
avant-garde, but ever since his 1988 cult hit Tales from the Gimli
Hospital, he has created movies that translate subconscious moods,
themes, and ideas into strangely distinct visual forms. His latest is
My Winnipeg, a most unusual tour of his hometown
in Manitoba, Canada.
Maddin is portrayed traveling on an outgoing passenger train lurching
through the snowy Winnipeg night, with projected moving shots of the
city passing across the windows. He and the other passengers are in
a shifting state between sleep and waking, their eyes always drifting
shut while the movement of the train wakes them up. To escape from this
place that he has resided in for his entire life, Maddin must travel
through everything that still binds him to Winnipeg—his family,
his past, city history, and weird pockets of arcane town lore and culture.
Shot
in black-and-white and deftly mixing archival footage with newly shot
material, the picture is utterly dreamlike. Yet it doesn't inspire a
passive attitude—Maddin’s intense, incantatory voice-over
narration, which makes use of symbolic repetitions and allusions, lends
the succession of imagery an almost maniacal intensity. There is a great
deal of oddball humor, as in for instance a reputed 1939 Winnipeg séance
featuring the appearance of a buffalo spirit called Broken Head, or
an episode in which the city mothers surround the town park’s
favorite tree to prevent it being cut down. At the same time there is
an underlying sense of displacement, even agony, about the past and
the elusiveness of memory.
In a sly homage
to film noir, Maddin has cast B-movie queen Ann Savage as his mother,
and her accusing presence in the family reenactment scenes is quite
alarming. Nuclear family and community blend into one haunted presence—Maddin
invests his hometown with all the perverse darkness of Kafka or Edgar
Allan Poe. It could be any town, really, since the skill with visual
form, complete with odd sound effects and slightly fuzzy intertitles,
turns a real place into a land of fitful dreams. Whether it’s
a group of horses’ heads frozen in the ice, or the crumbling façade
of the local hockey stadium, the film’s imagery demands alertness
of attention and sensitivity to the humorous side of melancholy.
©2008 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
