Brick Lane

Monica Ali’s novel followed a Bangladeshi village girl into an arranged marriage and a Tower Hamlets flat, and gave her years and several hundred pages to find a voice. Brick Lane is a careful, handsome, well-meant piece of work, kind to everyone in it, and kindness is a virtue in a person and a limit in a film. We liked it, and we kept waiting for it to raise its voice. It is Sarah Gavron’s first film, from a script by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones.

Tannishtha Chatterjee plays Nazneen almost entirely with her face. The script gives her a voiceover and little else to say aloud for the first half hour, and there were stretches where we were watching an actress wait. Chatterjee makes the waiting watchable. She holds still in a way that reads as attention rather than absence, and when she finally does something for herself, buying a sewing machine so the family has a second income, the small act lands. Until then her days are Chanu’s monologues, the girls’ meals and the view of the estate from the balcony.

Satish Kaushik’s Chanu is the reason to see it, and the best thing in it. He is introduced as a joke: a round, fussy man with a degree from Dhaka he brings up in every conversation, a job that never produces the promotion he expects, and a plan to take the family home that has been imminent for as long as anyone can remember. Kaushik plays all of that, and under it he plays a man who knows exactly how he sounds and cannot stop. He does it mostly with his shoulders, which drop a little every time someone looks away. We did not expect to be moved by him and we were, in a scene where he tries to teach his elder daughter about Bengal and she looks at him the way teenagers look at fathers everywhere.

Robbie Ryan shoots the estate in flat grey English daylight and the memories of Bangladesh in gold and green so saturated they look like a different film. Simon Elliott fills the flat with printed cloth and plastic so that it is crowded without being warm, and Michael O’Connor puts Nazneen in saris that are the brightest thing on any landing. Jocelyn Pook’s score, strings and a wordless voice, is used sparingly and sits under the film rather than on top of it. Melanie Oliver cuts the village memories short, a few seconds of paddy field or a running child, and for an hour they work. After that they become a habit: each one tells us Nazneen is thinking of home when we already knew, and there are a good many of them in the second half.

Where the film falls short is in the two things meant to change her. Karim (Christopher Simpson), the young man who brings the jeans for her to hem, is written as a political awakening and a love affair and plays as neither. Simpson is handsome and earnest, the scenes are lit like an advertisement for bed linen, and there is no heat in them; we never believed this careful woman would risk her daughters for this man. When the autumn of 2001 arrives and anger rises on the estate, it is handed to a couple of meetings in a community hall and leaflets. Naeema Begum’s Shahna, the elder daughter, a London girl furious at being told she belongs somewhere else, is the sharpest presence in the flat and spends most of the film in the next room. Harvey Virdi’s Razia gets the few laughs.

Gavron’s people murmur, and the film murmurs with them. Set against East Is East (1999) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), it is the quietest and most tasteful of the British films about families caught between two countries. Those two films had rows in them; this one has a husband who lectures and a wife who listens, and the volume rarely changes from one scene to the next.

It is worth an evening, particularly at home, where its smallness suits the screen. Watch it for Kaushik, for Ryan’s two palettes and for Chatterjee’s stillness. We left wanting to hear what the woman at the centre of it would have said if anyone had let her finish a sentence. It runs 102 minutes and carries a 15 certificate.