Sarah Gavron's movie brings Monica Ali's popular novel about Bangladeshis in London to the screen, which bears comparison with Mira Nair's recent screened novel of an Indian family in America, The Namesake. Less fun, more limited in focus, Brick Lane nonetheless adds interesting new notes with its emphasis on the young arranged bride. Nazneen Ahmed (lovely, slightly mysterious Tannishtha Chatterjee) is seventeen when married off to Chanu Ahmed (the interesting Satish Kaushik). He is not only older, fat, and unattractive, but a rather silly man. He pretends to be an intellectual like Ashoke (Irfan Khan) of The Namesake, but if he is, he can't parlay his love of Proust and David Hume into a good job. Eventually he becomes a bus driver, but not before he has gotten embroiled with a woman usurer in the community to buy a computer. Meanwhile Nazneen starts sewing to make money, and the young Bangladeshi man who runs the factory, Karim (Christopher Simpson), has an affair with her.

2001 comes and Karim quickly turns militant and Islamic, while Chanu Ahmed comes through as more complex than we might have realized. He's a suffering mensch, a man who just can't fit in, and therefore also someone who doesn't flow with the prejudices or confusions of the crowd; and hence it's he who makes a strong little speech deflating the local Bangladeshis' claim to Islam historically as something that necessarily unites them. Of course Chanu Ahmed is also out of touch with his wife and their two girls (they've been in London for twenty years now, though the time is a little too vaguely telescoped). When the husband/father gets ready to return to Bangladesh after two decades, wife and daughters simply refuse to go. To save face he announces that he's decided they will follow later. Chanu Ahmed tells his wife he simply cannot stay, and she replies that England is her home now--as her young lover Karim told her earlier. But she has told Karim that she doesn't want to marry him.

The dialogue is on this simple level. What's subtle in Brick Lane is the way changes in characters slowly unfold over time. But though Nazneed is elegant and enigmatic and Chanu Ahmed acquires an appeal that is far more than skin deep, characters lack depth due to the not-so-interesting lines they're provided with. Family saga though this may be, it fails to pass the torch on to the children as The Namesake does, and all the relationships just seem to fizzle out. There's no clear hint of how they will end up.

If one thinks of the brilliant mid-Eighties Stephen Frears-Hanif Kureishi collaboration about Pakistanis in London My Beautiful Laundrette, with its novelistically complex characters and situations, one realizes that despite the soulfulness of Brick Road's heroine and the surprising complexity of her unattractive mate--and the droll humor and multi-generational scope of The Namesake--neither of these films condensing novels has writing as fine and original and rich as Kureishi's.

The wife of Brick Lane is a lovely woman, but her correspondence relationship with her sister back home seems an unfortunate casualty of the screen adaptation--it's never quite clear what all the flashbacks to their shared childhood are meant to mean in adult terms or why that relationship too, like the others, fizzles out. The interest of this new film remains its focus on the obvious possibility that though an arranged marriage may lead to propagation, it may never move on to understanding, and that an old man may remain unattractive. The husband goes home only because all his opetions have died. But that is a real outcome we don't often get to see.

Seen in London November 21, 2007. U.S. release as yet unscheduled.

I'm sure Brick Lane will strike some kind of chord with those depicted within, namely British based immigrants from the sub-continent, as everything from the struggling to adjust to a new life and culture right the way through to having to face discrimination from the locals, is detailed. For the rest of us, the film is nicely effective enough in its dramatic qualities to somewhat enthusiastically recommend, as the plight of a frustrated middle aged woman of Bangladeshi descent, whom strives to work things out with her husband; maintain the mothering of two daughters and just generally get by, is explored. The film revolves around this family and a handful of characters whom live in London's Brick Lane Muslim community, but there is no reason Sarah Gavron's film should be a film limited to representing just the British Muslims living there, more-so representative of those throughout the United Kingdom as a collective whole. An additional sense of refreshment arrives in the form of the film revolving around a woman, detailing the tribulations of a female living under British conditions but not enjoying this apparent promised land and suffering similar hardships at the hands of her husband as she might indeed go through back home anyway.

This lead is Nazneen (Chatterjee), a woman we observe walks down the titular Brick Lane amidst the bricked up walls; market stalls and generally cramped, enclosed locale after having previously dreamt of her home land in Bangladesh as this tranquil, beautiful and apparently elusive paradise she strives to be at one with. The dreams of being back at home stem from the letters she receives from her sister, detailing a free and spirited life away from arranged marriages and enclosed living; the montages and sequences of Bangladesh in stark comparison to how Gavron shoots Nazneen in London, as her face fills the frame and she keeps a look out on all sides of the screen suggesting awareness; paranoia and disdain. Nanzeen lives with husband Chanu (Kaushik), someone much elder than she is and a suitor whom was the result of an arranged marriage, and the two aforementioned daughters in Bibi and Rukshana. Nazneen is additionally haunted by the memory of her own mother taking her life many years ago.

One would assume the point Gavron is trying to make through Brick Lane, and I'd additionally assume a similar idea filters through in the novel on which this is based, is that the idea of sub-Continent immigration to the British Isles brings about the antithesis of what glories and riches the Western world appear to promise. In living in Britain, few can doubt husband Chanu's success story in owning an apartment; earning much in the way of money and possessing a decent job in computing, but what about the women whom are forced to tag along? The film's view on their stance has us believe it leads them to longing for a life back where they were; that the temptation to commit infidelity arises and that this life does nothing but spur on the woman of the relationship to garner her own job, all under this canopy of individualism and independence – the trouble being that, highlighted through Chanu, it tears the family apart as the cracks in the plan to arrange marriages and ship on out of places like Bangladesh to the First World as soon as possible for as long as possible begin to dramatically appear.

If Chanu means well, then it is a meaning well that rejects British, indeed Western, attitudes. A crucial scene sees Chenu bring home a computer and attempt to hook up to the Internet, something one of the daughters rejects in her turning away of modernity; embracing of independence and continuous talk of wishing, like her mother, to be back home in Bangladesh instead of dwelling in London. Nazneen's venturing astray from her husband and the world in which she finds herself sees her land a romantic relationship in the form of an affair with a young fabric salesman named Karim (Simpson), whom visits her during the day when Chenu is at work. He is unlike Chenu, he stands in in stark binary-opposition to him in that he's younger, slimmer and much more enthusiastic about Nazneen's idea of being a tailor and thus engaging in a profession; something it appeared Chenu saw as a threat to his masculinity as an apparent bread-bringer. One such scene sees Gavron shoot one of their more intimate scenes amidst a cluster of wine bottles colouring the screen in a blood red as the other half of it retains a clearer, whiter hue; thus highlighting the clashing senses of both danger in the illegality of the event juxtaposed with the supposed liberation she feels in being with Karim. Film aficionados will have already picked up on the inclusion of David Lean's mid 1940s melodrama Brief Encounter, a film Nazneen glares at as it plays on television as the item of an extra marital affair emerges.

In what is a film that rejects the view of Asian immigrants coming to Britain for a far better existence, particularly in regards to the women, the film is equally stern in its toying with other conventions or 'expectations'; a local loan shark is this elderly, eccentric woman and the love story between Nazneen and Karim seeing the female participant of the relationship objectifying the male and using him for a sexual release rather than the other way around. The film saves its richest example of symbolism for the very end when it uses a train station complete with a number of tracks visibly heading off into a number of different tunnels and directions as emotions and the want for escape, or liberation, reach agonising peaks; suggesting forks in life that break off down dark, looming routes into the unknown. The film balances its ranging content of social, racial and gender commentary studiously; culminating in an interesting drama about an immigrant family coming apart.

As I started watching Brick Lane my heart soared. The beauty of its appreciation of nature (Bangladeshi scenes from the lead character's memory) reminded me of the masterpieces of Deepa Mehta if not of Satyajit Ray. It tells of a young girl whose father marries her off to an educated Bangladeshi back in London. Displaced from her homeland, her heart is full of secret sorrow until she finds herself attracted to a man younger than her husband and much closer to her own age. From that point she begins much soul searching, examining her own identity and place in the world.

"For us," says director Sarah Gavron, "'Brick Lane' as a title symbolises a sanctuary to successive waves of immigrants searching for home. That search, rather than the bricks and mortar of the street, is at the heart of the story." I admit that her description helps me to have a better view of the film but I wish it had been more apparent in the footage.

A beautiful love story develops, with a subplot about resisting Islamic extremism. Yet I soon felt as if I were watching a kind of updated Jane Austen novel where the Brick Lane (East London) Bangladeshi community were used simply to provide a fresh plot device.

I read some of the adverse comments from Brick Lane spokespeople that plagued the film's opening. I didn't feel I could relate to them. I found nothing offensive in the film. Except it seemed to me somehow a curiously British portrayal of Bangladeshis. There is plenty of reference to Bangladeshi or Muslim issues but authenticity seems a little uneven. Translation of a prayer is touching. But a reference to the Muslims that died in Partition (at the end of colonial rule) seems less heartfelt. The young daughter, who has only ever known British ways, is a very convincing character on the other hand. I am tempted to wish that the original prize-winning writer had focused her efforts more on the daughter, someone much closer to her own diaspora experience.

As a film it succeeds. Exquisite photography and bundles of unarticulated emotion sweep us along at a heady pace. As a glimpse of another culture it is on less secure ground. The people claiming it misrepresented them may not have been statistically significant but why did it stir up so much trouble? Consider this. When Gurinder Chadha made Bride and Prejudice, she focused on the positive qualities of the two protagonists and cultures (India and America). When Deepa Meetha made Water, she focused on the positive strengths of the women on whose behalf the film was (in part) a protest. Sarah Gavron's heroine in Brick Lane, on the other hand, is almost an entirely a passive recipient of circumstance. We suspect she is a lovely person, but it needs more than some idyllic childhood memories of running through paddy fields to pinpoint the beauty within her. Much as the director's comment gives a higher purpose and reading to the film, it is not so obvious from viewing alone. Her comment about a sanctuary is a very spiritual one - perhaps even capable of uniting Muslims and Jews one day. But although her protagonist's husband does make reference to it at a Muslim meeting it could too easily be missed. Sadly, but not surprisingly, some audiences have reacted to the extremely personal (but more negative) images of her trapped and isolated woman.

For a film with a serious intent, Brick Lane stops short at quality entertainment. Compare Mira Nair's epic The Namesake, which asks questions about identity and answers them. Or the way Satyajit Ray looks at home and identity through simple observation If Sarah Gavron had wanted to accomplish anything as grand as the search for sanctuary in a foreign land, her scope needed to be more ambitious.