Screen
O'Brien, Tom
registers just how much, beneath his benign domestic inten- Screen ...
...In even the most mundane mur- everyday and the more unwieldly evils 9 May 1986: 279...
...As fugitive for whom he prepares home remedies and hot milk...
...ror of violence...
...279 pp...
...been the subject of Caroline indefatigable belief in the second chance, Blackwood's previous novels...
...TOM O'BRIEN CAROLINE BLACKWOOD & THE FALL FROM GRACE The illusion of refuge ROBERT JONES der mystery, the family member is often becoming paralyzed by her mother's terthe killer...
...1976, 110 pp...
...Often LADIES to the Irish country house of Great there is, but often there is not...
...Indeed, with nice subtlety, The basic irony of My Beautiful Laundrette involves the Holland suggests that his original charity was no more than success that some Pakistanis have in British business...
...and figurative intoxication on drink and sex...
...As he we seem least willing to relinquish...
...Nasser, however, he is as liberated from neocolonial shackles Alas, as she gets better she also looks better to Leon, and as the character he plays...
...where we end will be some place further Penguin Books London, Our own lives are supposed to be a haaway and better from where we began...
...But the major disappointment involves the portrayal of the Indeed, My Beautiful Laundrette is only an hour and a half English, principally a gang of punks and their leader (Daniel long, almost, literally, half a movie...
...Holland thus provides a shelters a Jewish woman from Vienna who has escaped from rich, complicated portrait of humanity's flaws and strengths...
...The film is often called "refreshing," which is but on someone caught in the middle whose impulses enor- synonymous these days with underproduced, elliptically strucmously complicate reactions to the pressures of the times...
...Ironically, the nephew takes such inspiration at Jews as "rabble...
...One terrible scene when they cook a goose Nasser's speeches he decides to outdo him...
...resembles the works of Kristoff Janussi and Margaret von Trotta, other young Central European directors whose gift for Y BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE is this year's candidate for the sifting through the history of the Second World War always M overpraised foreign film, the kind of slight offbeat work raises uncomfortable questions of complicity with evil...
...Nas- Pakistanis have been in many English films and books...
...he won't traffic in Jewish prop- the late Empire on the subcontinent (i.e...
...Sadly, he had taken over the family after his father died and his however, the movie is all dressed up with nowhere to go...
...Day-Lewis acts his Dim Sum, another miniature study of Eastern immigrants (this role well, but despite his continual presence, the character is time Chinese in San Francisco) making good, in which half the never fully drawn...
...dividual to beat the odds and live exempt CORRIGAN I wondered if she would ever manfrom the injustices which afflict and de- Caroline Blackwood age to escape the demon-infested fine the past...
...kidnaps his daughter to save her from sees the tiny body sprawled on the paveIf we no longer have much faith in histor- ment, he thinks: ical progress, some still hope for the in- And if the child were to survive...
...ing exactly "what a good man Leon is," a phrase that runs like His casting is ironic in film history: he usually appears in a refrain through the early part of the film...
...But the refuge of the personal may Although we pay lip service to the be our most enduring illusion...
...tured, and often vulgar and amoral...
...Holland's directing miracle is that Angry Harvest is no simple tale of ironic inversion...
...drawn from or about their behavior...
...in Kipling's The Man erty...
...The tale concerns writes to him after the war from America, a letter that thanks Leon Wolny (Armin Mueller Stahl), a Silesian farmer who him for the "goodness" of his deeds...
...when Without the least effort on her part, Rosa's dark slim beauty told that it looks bad and might lead to hatred of other Eastern provokes him to sexual daring he would never have attempted immigrants, he retorts surely, "But I'm not a professional with normal women of his milieu, driving him to both literal Pakistani...
...an Auschwitz-bound transport...
...brother was arrested by the Nazis...
...at its most transcendent as belief in God...
...Leon can report American theaters as a supporting actor for whites in tales of only petty sins at confession...
...and fear we have learned from experiof course, and the desire to live happily ence...
...Leon is a devout, sexually guing sets in recent film, the laundrette of the title that one of timid, unhandsome bachelor...
...immigrants themselves...
...It's a subtle way of convey- intelligence and drollery, a perfect setup for a likable villain...
...Much of the dialogue and interesting view of what one might call "reverse cultural action involving both is less elliptical than murky...
...While Leon's degeneration is disgusting, Holland links it inseparably to his basic human IRONIC VARIATIONS need to fulfill himself...
...It also contains one of the most intriThe tale is richly ambiguous...
...The film ends with a letter the daughter Holland, a student of Andrei Wajda...
...But, ser's daughter Tania, a nymphette, is reduced to pouty discon- irony aside, this leaves the film with a half-formed feel: it's an tent with her home and love life...
...One fine scene shows him evicting provokes appetites long suppressed under his "goodness...
...It resembles the recent Day-Lewis), a childhood friend of Omar...
...At the literally behaving toward Rosa like "his brother's keeper...
...One never knows what motivates him: old fun was watching "cute" Asiatics acting as bourgeois as friendship, desire for escape from the Cockney ghetto, or the "normal" Americans...
...Hope has many manifestations, Scribners, 1977, $7.95, 135 pp...
...it seems to be kept around to them, refurbishes his business under the cheeky name of provide the threat of violence, and, at the end, a predictable "Powders," and then outfits it not just with new machines, but mini-apocalypse at "Powders...
...cheerfully evokes the small terrors of the happen...
...Moreover, the director makes clear that 'HARVEST' & 'LAUNDRETTE' Leon never entirely loses his original kindness in responding to Rosa, and is even prompted by her to help other fugitives, including the daughter of a local Jewish merchant who belongs to the partisan resistance (the kind that former Israeli Prime A NGRY HARVEST is an exceptional film - tart, tough, and Minister Begin, whose family died in the Holocaust, served tautly directed by the Polish film-maker Agnieszka with during the war...
...impoverished squatters from some tenements he owns...
...He tries to convert her to Christianity so he a piece of this one...
...Filmed in West Germany, it It's a harsh film, but a human one...
...The role is played with fine mischief by enriched by the denial of any sensuality: to him, Rosa is no Saeed Jeffrey, an Indian actor whose round face conveys both more than a human being in need...
...We ignore Caroline Blackwood Granny Webster to the middle-class buntoo easily the possibility of the sneak Heinemann, London, galows of The Fate of Mary Rose, she attack in the dark, the accident waiting to 1983, 136 pp...
...Unfortunately, the film consists mainly of these characters The film may seem ironically just in this respect: the English and this setting...
...Once a candidate for priesthood, the immigrants redecorates in imaginative fashion...
...The use of one point roundly declares in stentorian Victorian tones, "I garments to symbolize identity is an old device, but here it's believe in England...
...ven...
...imperialism," but as artistically unsatisfying as the original...
...From the in our hope that somewhere lies the mira- GOOD MIGHT SWEET highrise apartment of The Stepdaughter cle cure, the last-minute rescue...
...But the child has learned 0 F THE MANY lies our parents tell us, At the end of Caroline Blackwood's to fear even her father and so flings herthe myth of the happy life is the one novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, a father self from the car to escape him...
...To be sure, My Beautiful Moreover, she does their often rickety plot structures one Laundrette has appealing subject matter, the culture clash better by concentrating almost all the action in one place, between lower-class English youths and Pakistani immigrants Leon's basement, where he shelters the fugitive Rosa in South London, deftly complicated by a clash among the (Elisabeth Trissenar...
...center is one Nasser, a small businessman who owns garages When he first finds her delirious with illness in the woods and and other varied commercial holdings, worships Margaret takes her to his house, he chastely tries to get her to change her Thatcher and the opportunities that capitalism offers, and at wet clothing for some old clothes of his brother...
...I'm a professional businessman...
...murky world of her mother, if for setbacks tripping everyone around us, we Mary Rose the plunge towards the want to be optimistic for ourselves and THE STEPDAUGHTER tarmac would not always seem believe that life has forward motion, that Caroline Blackwood safer than life...
...The other Pakistanis are poorly drawn, espe- are viewed as selectively and as shadowily as Indians and cially one of Nasser's associates, a thug named Salim...
...This provides "differences," to be homosexual attraction to Omar the film makes explicit...
...registers just how much, beneath his benign domestic intenScreen tions, Leon has become his appetites...
...After a certain Nasser is at odds not just with the English poor but his own point, he is as much jailer as savior, refusing to allow Rosa to past, represented by an ex-journalist and socialist brother leave and even hiding evidence that her husband also escaped (Roshan Seth), who once hoped for a better world, not simply from the transport...
...The engenius of our most depressed artists, in GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER ergy of human desire naturally seeks to our hearts most of us remain failed pes- Caroline Blackwood protect us from the calamity, disillusion, simists...
...Begging for manCommonweal: 278 agement of a laundry, the nephew steals some drugs, resells gang, moreover, is faceless...
...Summit Books, 1981, This threat of the world outside has But in a certain sense, both attest to the $11.95, 208 pp...
...But there is no lesson to be with fish tanks, video games, and conceptual art...
...he is admired by everyone - most of all by his secret Who Would Be King or Forster's A Passage to India...
...Despite the detours and Viking, $15.95...
...Broken and alcoholic, the brother appeals can marry her after the war, but still cannot refrain from raping for Nasser to help his son Omar (Gordon Warnecke) with a her over the kitchen table and insulting the other persecuted summer job...
...Like that jaded critics and viewers worship because of its "differthem, Holland doesn't focus on a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, ences...
...The curse is that trying to live hapever after can be seen at its most rudimen- THE FATE OF ]MARY ROSE pily, we are in constant flight from life tary level as the pursuit of affluence, and Caroline Blackwood itself...
...The sure, but it's only skin deep...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 9
