Brick Lane

Film: Brick Lane
Cast: Satish Kaushik, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Christopher Simpson
Genre: Drama
Direction: Susan Gavron
Duration: 1 hour 41 minutes
Critic's Rating: 4 stars


Story: Young Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is sent off as a 17-year-old bride from her village in Bangladesh to Brick Lane in East London, after her wedding to the much elder, Chanu (Satish Kaushik). She settles down uncomplainingly to a dull and monotonous life of quiet domesticity with her likeable, yet boring husband and two daughters, until love and passion walk into her life against an incendiary post 9/11 backdrop.

Movie Review: Isn't this the biggest irony of the Indian film distribution system that a film with Indian artists, which has won over sundry fans -- and garnered rave reviews -- the world over, finds a low key release in India, almost after three years? And that too, only in a single city (Mumbai), despite the fact that the film deals with a purely sub-continental issue (the migrant experience) and showcases some towering histrionics by desi talent. Both Satish Kaushik and Tannishtha Chatterjee literally set the screen ablaze with their gentle, restrained and unforgettable portrayals of a mismatched Bangladeshi couple that gradually learn the meaning of love and togetherness, against a backdrop of personal and social turmoil.

Based on the riveting book by Monica Ali, the film is a fine celluloid adaptation: extremely picturesque, pithy, introspective and not at all verbose. Nazneen's journey begins as a young girl from the backwaters of Bangladesh as her carefree childhood games are suddenly interrupted with her mother's suicide. And then comes the seminal dialogue where the young Nazneen says: Nobody questioned mother's death because if we were allowed to ask questions, God would have made us boys. Hence, the virtue of silence and unquestioning acceptance, as Nazneen passes from girlhood to wifehood and motherhood, without ever experiencing the highs and lows of life. Of course, she has husband Chanu by her side: the good and kind Chanu who quotes Chaucer and Hume and dreams of fitting in as the perfect Brit. But is Chanu her dream man....Indeed, a difficult decision to make, specially when the young firebrand Karim (Christopher Simpson) walks into her lonely afternoons with his quest for the unspoit village girl.

Watch the film for the grandeur that both Satish Kaushik and Tannishtha Chatterjee invest in their role of the low key couple who try to cope with a changing world order. Satish Kaushik completely reinvents himself as an actor as Chanu, the quintessential nice guy, the eternal optimist and the unflinching liberal. And watch it for its humanist-feminist-non-fundamentalist message.