Review of Brick Lane (2007) by Andersson M — 04 Sep 2009

I read the novel this summer, and thought it was excellent. Probably, as is often the case, I should have seen the movie first. The adaptation understandably streamlines the (very layered) plots of the book, but unfortunately it also oversimplifies characters. Nazneen remains an excellent character, wrestling with two societies and her own desires. But I think Chanu suffers and Karim is elevated, although the strength of the novel was that you saw how limited both men were by the expectations they had been born into and their own inability to reconcile two different value sets.

There were things I really liked about the movie - the performances, which were especially helpful in giving voices to the characters (I'm not good at imagining voices) and the visuals were great - and things I kind of liked, and things I didn't like at all. The storytelling formula didn't work for me. Brick Lane didn't need flashbacks or a voiceover, and they harmed the movie's effectiveness. In many ways, the story is quite unconventional but those techniques are SUPER conventional.