TIFF Review: Brick Lane

The much-loved 2003 English novel Brick Lane, about a Bangladeshi woman who travels to London to take part in an arranged marriage to an older man, has now been realized as a depressing, static drama that will have heads lolling backwards and eyes drooping wherever it plays. From all the protests that have been mounted over this project -- some natives of the predominantly Muslim Brick Lane neighborhood in London found the book to be culturally insulting and wanted nothing to do with the adaption -- most observers expected the resulting film to be at the very least divisive and electric, pulling no punches in its frank exploration of racial and cultural tensions in modern London. Instead, what we've been given is a quasi-literal staging of the book's many family drama scuffles, unevenly-paced and amateurishly directed by helmer Sarah Gavron. There are some nice exchanges here and there, but not nearly enough to make up for the endless scenes of melodramatic bickering; the passions burn on a low-flame but never come close to catching fire.

Starring is Bollywood actress Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen, a poor Bangladeshi girl whose world and options are significantly narrowed when her mother unexpectedly dies. Without the luxury of being able to choose her own way forward in life, Nazneen is immediately packed off to Brick Lane, where a rotund, boisterous man named Chanu, played by Satish Kaushik, is working menial jobs but deluding himself into thinking that he's some kind of enterprising entrepreneur. When he's laid off, it's an opportunity for upward mobility in the workforce. When he gets a third-rate job, it's anything but. He's a deluded optimist, nourishing a blind spot that will protect him from seeing his own failures. As played by Kaushik, Chanu is by far the most compelling character in the film, but there's very little room for the character to move in the story, and once we've seen his schtick in the first thirty minutes or so, we've pretty much seen it all. Nazneen and Chanu are so mismatched as a couple that they don't even provide for the viewer any interesting clashes.

Lost in her new environment and worlds apart from Chanu intellectually and emotionally, Nazneen eventually falls into the orbit of another man named Karim (Christopher Simpson), who is less interested in bootstrap-pulling and wedging himself into the everyday flow of the community than in exploring his own identity as a Muslim. His place in the story is heightened and altered by the events of September 11, which of course impacts all the characters in the story -- how they perceive themselves, their ethnic community, and the rest of the world. For what seems like hours, Karim and Nazneen dance around the possibility of infidelity and Nazneen frets over what dumping Chanu would do to her prospects and her family situation. The pacing is critically off during their scenes together -- director Gavron presumably feels all of the tensions boiling underneath the surface, but she doesn't do a very good job of bringing those tensions to a boil. As we continue to wait for payoffs and interesting developments, the talking and fretting and prestidigitation continues until our interest begins to wain.

It's tempting to simply make a list of all the elements neglected in Brick Lane. At the top would surely be the cinematography and the art direction, which could have been brilliant in a film with this subject matter, but seem to have been the victims of either a seriously low budget or general lack of enthusiasm. The score and the scripting are also noticeably underwhelming, with the words 'made for television' floating around in my head more than once during the screening. Perhaps Brick Lane is one of those books that just doesn't leap off the page in a filmic style, but you have to believe that any book is adaptable in the right hands. Ian McEwan's Atonement was thought to be so internal and solipsistic that any attempt at filming it would surely be doomed, but Joe Wright put those fears to rest at this year's TIFF. Brick Lane, which played at the same fest, and was also widely praised and beloved as a book, fails to make the grade as a motion picture.