Review of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) by Corey N — 24 Jun 2007

My Beautiful Laundrette is set within the Asian community in London, during the Thatcher years, and displays those values, of money but 'anybody can make it.'.

Omar gains the running of his Uncle Nasser's laundrette. He is helped by his friend Johnny who is an outsider, white but not entirely accepted by either the white or Asian Londoners...

Full of memorable characters and a sparkling script, my beautiful launderette is one of the seminal anti-thatcher films there is out there. relying heavily on the racial and homosexual elements to the film, they took a big risk when making this slap bang in the middle of the eighties when the problem of mis-understanding was rife.

The cast are fantastic, and the script sparkles with wit and intelligence. it's quite a hard film to watch at times, because the audience knows that something unsettling is always an undercurrent theme of the movie. the sets are suitably dirty, apart from the 'powders' launderette, which I feel that was done intentionally to show that people can make a chance in life, whatever creed, colour or sexual orientation.