The Talkies/Luv Stories
Bawer, Bruce
Jackie and JFK spent time. If you do insist on getting out before nightfall, say, after lunch, trudge up to the New-port Book Store on Bellevue Avenue, where a recent tour turned up a September 1963...
...Elaine becomes a local celebrity...
...Elaine, who's on the dole, replies that "it works that way here too...
...We cut to a seedy working-class neighbor-hood of Liverpool, where young Elaine (Alexandra Pigg) and Tbresa (Margi Clarke) decide to forget their troubles and get happy for an evening...
...And they have a conversation whose purpose is patently to suggest that the girls' negative image of Soviet life is wholly the result of ignorance and insidious Western propaganda...
...Probably not...
...They meet, they dance, they wander the grimy streets and neck, they gaze up at the stars and deliver some astoundingly corny dialogue...
...At the same time Omar renews a childhood friendship with a tough Anglo punk named Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), from whom he has been estranged for years because his father once glimpsed Johnny at an anti-Pakistani rally...
...The Kremlin bosses permit the marriage and invite Elaine to Mother Russia...
...The only side it takes, indeed, is that of family and friendship—and, most of all, love, of whatever variety—against hatred and factionalism and violence...
...The film's goal, remarkably, is not to score points for this or that side but to understand and illuminate the human condition in all its motley manifestations, and to discover the pathos and humor—and humanity—that proliferate on every front...
...Not all of it, Peter informs them...
...If you do insist on getting out before nightfall, say, after lunch, trudge up to the New-port Book Store on Bellevue Avenue, where a recent tour turned up a September 1963 Esquire, a first edition of William Shirer's Berlin Diary, and a first paperback edition of Ladislas Farago's Patton, the lot liberated for under seven dollars...
...Tbresa and the bearlike Sergei (Alfred Molina), who speaks no English and whom Tbresa calls "Eye-gor," have a lusty time of it...
...one of them exclaims...
...The four end up at a hotel...
...The founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator examines what he believes are the frequently incoherent, often infantile (and nearly always dangerous) ideas of the New Age Liberals in The Liberal Crack-Up...
...And it's a romance in more ways than one...
...It's a lovely image, the perfect ending to a wondrously original and affecting film...
...Would the Liverpool papers carry it on the front page, if at all...
...but Elaine and her bright, sensitive Peter (who seems to understand the Liverpudlian brogue much better than I do) spend the night jawing about life and stuff...
...Omar, however, chooses instead to work for his wealthy wheeler-dealer of an uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), and soon develops into a canny small-time entrepreneur, graduating from a job washing cars in the uncle's underground parking garage to the managership of his rundown laundrette...
...You've got to be prepared, the Foreign Office chap tells her, "to give up everything...
...The film thus refrains from drawing facile comparisons of value between Omar's homosexuality and his uncle's heterosexuality, between his father's stubborn socialism and his uncle's fanatical capitalism, between Omar's devotion to the Western way of life and his aunt's obstinate loyalty to Pakistani folkways, or between the conflicting claims and grievances of the Anglo-Pakistanis and the lower-class natives...
...They all keep yammering at her that if she goes to Russia she'll be sacrificing her freedom...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 Would a Foreign Office chap actually try to convince her that the young man was already married—considering that the Soviets, presumably aware of the boy's marital status, had already permitted the wedding...
...The main show is right next door: The Candy Store, which includes a restaurant, a couple of bars, including one overlooking the harbor, and a basement disco...
...Peter: "I'll always love you, you know...
...Before long the young men are not only friends but lovers, a development that the film treats matter-of-factly...
...It is plainly the product of a sophisticated moral sensibility, of a mind (or a pair of compatible minds) too fine to be easily violated by a mere idea...
...If Reply Card is missing, simply call 1-800-341-1522 to place your order...
...To receive your copy of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s The Liberal Crack-Up for only $8.95 (retail value of $16.95) and a one-year subscription of The American Spectator, send $29.95 today...
...The bar on the ground floor is presided over by the diminutive "Five-O," a man of infinite and inscrutable wisdom, and a Rutger Hauer lookalike, both of whom whip up extremely tasty Bloody Marys...
...When night falls, the Smart Set heads over to the Black Pearl on Bannister's Wharf for dinner, stopping at the bar for pre-game cocktails and anexplanation from the bartender with bristling red moustaches of why he, a 34-year-old man, remains at work in a resort area, when logic might dictate that he move on...
...When Peter, for example, announces that he's from a warm, sunny resort town on the Black Sea, the girls protest: Isn't Russia cold...
...But perhaps the movie's greatest strength lies in its unpolemical yet engage approach to virtually everything it touches...
...he observes that in the Soviet Union, if you don't work, you don't eat...
...This is a signal to proceed to dinner, starting with the chowder and clams casino, then on through the beef "torpedoes" (as one of our party has dubbed them), and finishing up with the leaden chocolate mousse, which settles the stomach into a molten mass...
...Teresa's original plan is to stiff him, but she ends up paying the fare (plus tip) because "he's one of us...
...Tbresa takes revenge for this insult by lifting the bigger one's wallet—thus proving herself a proud, clever, and gutsy foot soldier in the British class war (not to mention providing the motivation for a brief chase scene...
...With justthe right timing, you can bring down the bar with the famed quotation, "Hi Curt Gowdy, this is everybody," a three-run homer in any saloon, and well worth the $1.75 you paid for this magazine...
...My Beautiful Laundrette is also set in the English slums—London this time—and is likewise concerned with England's faltering economy, with the moral crisis of her working classes, and with a love affair between two young people who are supposed to hate each other...
...ibresa holds down a dismal factory job stuffing chickens...
...She at-tends a party, but the crude English lads there want only one thing from her...
...This is not to suggest that Kureishi and Frears shrink from an honest examination of working-class despair and racial tension in contemporary England...
...They don't...
...For all the message-mongering, of course, Letter to Brezhnev is really nothing more than an old-fashioned fourth-rate love story with a twist—girl meets Red, girl loses Red, girl wins Red...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Then again, perhaps only the fare served aboard the Bounty would disappoint me...
...By the time the next evening rolls around—and the men have to rejoin their ship and head back out to sea—Elaine and Peter have cornily declared their mutual ardor...
...Interestingly, thoughthere isn't a line of "romantic" dialogue between them, their love is a good deal more convincing than the soppily pro-claimed amour of Elaine and Peter in Brezhnev...
...There are less innocent and rewarding ways to spend time...
...Peter, for his part, is surprised by Elaine's unemployment...
...The author (Hanif Kureishi) and director (Stephen Frears) are out not to present a simpleminded argument upon a theme they know little or nothing about, but rather to explore perceptively and dispassionately a milieu they obviously know very well...
...There Elaine and Peter (played by the pallid Peter Firth), one of those two Soviet sailors, lock eyes across a crowded room and fall in love...
...On the contrary, they have made a life-affirming film that touchingly and persuasively pro-claims the potency of affection, kindness, and hope, a film that celebrates the modest triumphs which bring meaning and even a sort of magic to ordinary lives...
...But neither do they wallow in nihilism or depict Britain (a la Brezhnev) as a place fit only to escape from...
...They also become business partners, and together the two of them turn the laundrette into an elegantly hip, almost surrealistically glitzy establishment...
...But everybody in town (except Teresa) is against the marriage: her classic foul-mouthed English working-class movie witch of a mother, her horrible Commie-hating friends, a grotesquely cruel reporter who harasses her about being a Red, and an improbably slimy Foreign Office chap who tries to convince her that Peter already has a wife...
...37...
...The film begins with an image of death—an elevated train rattling past the apartment where Omar and his father live, and where Omar's mother, we learn, recently committed suicide by throwing herself on the tracks—and concludes with an image of life: Omar and Johnny play-fully splashing water on each other, cleansing bloody wounds...
...Screenwriter Frank Clarke doesn't miss a cliche...
...sweet, stolid Elaine is unemployed, a victim of Britain's crumbling economy...
...Laundrette has many virtues: wit, intelligence, perceptiveness, an exquisite tone, a well-paced narrative, a gallery of vivid and variegated characters, an excellent ensemble of players...
...But that's where the similarities end...
...D THE TALKIES : LUV STORIES At the beginning of Letter to Brezhnev two young Soviet sailors stand expectantly at the railing of a ship entering port, like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in On the 7bwn...
...if there are long lines at the stores, it's because the men in charge of distribution are idiots...
...When they ask about Soviet food shortages, Peter explains patientlythat there are no shortages...
...Elaine: "When, Peter, when...
...it has many different climates, "not like here...
...Peter: "We will be together again...
...but then this is not a realistic film (the graphic mice en scene notwithstanding) but a romance...
...And do they have troubles: sexy, streetwise Bruce Bawer, a regular contributor to the New Criterion, is The American Spectator's movie critic...
...When her letters to the proper authorities don't result in permission to do so, she does what we are apparently meant to see as a gutsy thing: she pens an obsequious plea to the late Uncle Leonid...
...Elaine, you see, is savvy enough to recognize this "freedom" jazz for what it is: a dastardly fiction designed to keep nice English girls and nice Soviet boys from getting to know and trust and love each other...
...the other replies, demonstrating, apparently, that young Soviet sailors are like young people everywhere...
...by Bruce Bawer The missive does the trick...
...Like Brezhnev, it has a grainy, in-expensive look (were both originally shot in 16mm...
...The angels congregate to The Candy Store, and are attentive to all tales, ranging from "I'm working on my municipal bond novel, Yield to Maturity," to "I'm first mate on the Mary Deare...
...The Candy Store is full of sweets...
...For it's yet another document in the history of the Western left's long-distance romance with the Soviet Union—or, rather, with some vaguely and rosily conceived idea of the Soviet Union...
...and is heavy on grim urban atmosphere...
...Though they can't afford it, the girls take a taxi downtown, sharing a joint with the driver...
...During the weeks after Peter's departure Elaine tries to forget him...
...Liver-pool...
...Beatles...
...Which is more than can be said for the pair of well-heeled gents who, in the first pub the girls step into, crudely offer to rent them for the night...
...The film's protagonist is Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a sweet and gentle young second-generation Anglo-Pakistani who lives in a gloomy flat with his poor, ill journalist father...
...Would a British girl really have so much trouble trying to get into the Soviet Union to marry a sailor...
...For Laundrette is far more imaginative and sensible, more honestly and delicately felt, than Brezhnev...
...she realizes that all she wants is to escape from this dismal, loveless corner of the world and marry Peter...
...Successful drinkers, like professional skiers, know that adequate preparation of the base is all, and the Black Pearl has never disappointed...
...The old man, who has strong (mostly socialist) opinions, wants Omar to go to college and become a journalist, a leader of his people...
...Her reply: "I haven't got anything to give up...
...But the story doesn't really get underway till our young ladies hit a flashy dance club...
...Directed by Chris Bernard, it's packed with not only verbal but visual cliches: a newspaper headline spinning into focus, lovers gazing up at a phony-looking skyful of stars...
...And it's got more than its share of dubious plot developments...
...If the love story in this film recalls countless banal tearjerkers of the thirties, its view of Russia is astoundingly reminiscent of the blinkered perceptions of American and British Communists during that same decade...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
