Brick Lane

At the center of “Brick Lane,” a modest new film directed by Sarah Gavron, is a woman for whom modesty is not just a defining character trait but also a moral principle. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who came to England from Bangladesh as a teenager for an arranged marriage, moves through her East London neighborhood as if determined to attract as little attention as possible. Pulling her sari tightly around her small frame and delicate face, she hurries home with her groceries; once inside her cramped apartment, she ministers quietly to the needs of her husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), and their two daughters.
Nazneen takes in a lot — Ms. Chatterjee’s ever-widening eyes may be her most notable feature — but gives away very little. If she mourns the death, many years earlier, of her infant son, or experiences boredom or frustration with her daily routines, these feelings stay far below the surface. Nazneen quotes a saying of her mother’s: Life is to be endured. Her uncomplaining passage from one day to the next bears out the truth of this fatalistic wisdom. But the dramatic crisis in “Brick Lane” arises when, quietly and by accident, she discovers the limits of her endurance.
Like Emma Bovary, literature’s most famous prisoner of normalcy, Nazneen uses reading as a means of escape. Rather than novels, she pores over letters from her sister, who stayed in their native country and whose life seems to be full of incident, intrigue and romance. Even after years in Britain, Nazneen, whose English is sometimes halting, does not regard it as home. When she has sex with Chanu, she lies back and thinks of Bangladesh.
Early in “Brick Lane,” which is based on a subtle and exacting novel by Monica Ali, it seems unlikely that anything will change for Nazneen. She seems indeed to be the fixed point in the midst of a series of small, predictable fluxes. Her husband will only grow fatter and more pompous as his grandiose dreams falter. Their daughters — in particular the older one, Shahana (Naeema Begum) — will struggle through an adolescence made more awkward by the tension between Bengali Muslim traditions and secular, permissive British mores.
But Ms. Ali’s novel chronicles a series of potentially cataclysmic alterations in Nazneen’s life and her perception of it. One change begets another: Chanu, passed over for a promotion, leaves his low-level bureaucratic job, and Nazneen, desperate to save enough money to return to Bangladesh, starts working as a seamstress at home. Karim (Christopher Simpson), the young man who delivers the clothes for her to sew, introduces her to a politicized sense of racial and religious identity, and also to adultery.
In a perceptive essay on “Brick Lane,” the literary critic James Wood noted that Ms. Ali’s novel brings some of the canonical concerns of 19th-century European fiction into a modern multicultural social setting. This fusion of an old style with a new reality gives the book its freshness and solidity, but it poses some problems for the film.
Ms. Gavron, working from a script by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones, veers between understatement and melodrama, and seems unable to convey the inner evolution that is the heart of the story. As a result the movie feels familiar rather than revelatory — a collection of ideas about the experience of Muslim immigrant women rather than a series of observations grounded in the experience of a particular woman.
“Brick Lane” is certainly touching, even heart-rending at times, and it mostly steers clear of the didacticism and sentimentality its subject matter often invites. But it never takes the full measure of its modest heroine, and makes her world a bit too small.
“Brick Lane” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language and sexual situations.
Da The New York Times, 20 Luglio 2008