A young man, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), lives in London with his depressed father.
His father is so bummed out that he just sits in bed all day and drinks. Omar is
offered a job by his uncle in his uncle’s parking garage. Soon he is promoted to
driving around drug trafficker Salim. One evening, while Omar is driving Salim
around, the car is approached by a small group of goofballs. While the dorks are
literally licking the car’s windows, Omar looks over to the side of the road and
there is sexy badboi Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) leaning up against a light pole.
They used to be schoolboy chums and begin talking again. Eventually other family
stuff happens and Omar is given a broken down laundromat to run. He hires Johnny
to help.
MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE is a watchable film (and I’m sure back in the mid-1980’s
it was a fresher idea), but overall, it left me flat. Maybe if I knew more about
Thatcher-era London I would have enjoyed it more but based on the Criterion
Collection disc cover and the various things I’d heard about the film over the
years, I was expecting the romantic relationship between Omar and Johnny to be
the main focus of the film. Instead, to me, it felt like Omar’s family was the
main focus, the tension between the street punks and well, everybody to be
second and finally, Omar and Johnny’s relationship third. Also, I didn’t get any
sexual chemistry between the two main actors.
Solid acting, a television set
behind a sofa, meddling pace, unimpressive
sets and locations that kinda gave off a made-for-TV vibe, too small of a cast,
multiple scenes out on the street but without any feel of it being a real street
with random citizens walking around, multiple unsympathetic characters
(including our two heroes, I especially felt bad for the little girl they
terrorized while they were stealing her family's electronics), 1980's fashions, a SOME LIKE IT
HOT poster, another poster for a movie that looks like it is called LAILA (which there is a movie from 1984 with that name), a very odd placement of a traffic light, a character with a face
tattoo (not sure what the historic timeline is on cinematic face tattoos, although
we all know that King Vidiot had one in 1983),
non-threatening street punks, a woman in jeans and a purple shirt playing a
video arcade machine but then when a fight breaks out it's a different woman in
jeans and a purple shirt, a weird water(?) sound effect that was annoying, a
"turf accountant" which I had to Google. It's the same as a betting hall, like for horse races. Also, how was Salim so naive as to not expect some kind of reprisal for what he did to the punks foot?
MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE is historically interesting and I’m glad it was made
(and I'm glad I watched it), but the entire thing felt undercooked to me. I would like to see a remake.
