My Beautiful Laundrette – 1985 | 87mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Set within the middle-class Asian community in London, director Stephen Frears critically acclaimed drama My Beautiful Launderette is an unusual love story concerned with identity and entrepreneurial spirit at the height of the Thatcherite free market. Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi’s Oscar-nominated screenplay is an intelligent multi-layered and multi-cultural snapshot of 80s Britain – with all the fully-rounded characters duplicity on class, morals, and sexuality fully illustrated. This seminal 1980s drama provided Daniel Day-Lewis with his breakthrough role.

Impoverished young Asian Omar (Gordon Warnecke) lives with his alcoholic widower father (Roshan Seth) in a rundown house opposite a railway station. Before embarking on an anticipated university placement, Omar is sent by his father to work for his adulterous wheeler-dealer uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey). Omar is initially put to work in Nasser’s garage until grasping the opportunity to manage his uncle’s dilapidated laundrette with the intention of turning it into a glittering palace of commercial success. When he employs boyhood friend and ex-National Front member Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) they become lovers as well as working partners. However, complications soon ensue as the anger of Johnny’s discarded fascist gang begins to build and Omar is forced to face increasingly difficult family issues.