Article 3: FILM; For His New Film, Hanif
Kureishi Reaches for a 'Beautiful Laundrette'
By J. B. MILLER;
Published: August 2, 1992
In
a large house in Notting Hill a stately white mansion that has obviously seen
better days -- technicians bashed a hole in the living room, trying to attach a
bike to the ceiling.
"I
wrote this scene in a pub," said Hanif Kureishi
gleefully, admiring the pandemonium from the comfort of a sofa. He was clearly
enjoying the trouble he had caused. The prop was for a hallucination scene in
"London Kills Me," Mr. Kureishi's third screenplay and his
directorial debut. The film opens in
Half-English,
half-Pakistani, Hanif Kureishi (pronounced Ha-NEEF
Ku-REE-shee) is a playwright, screenwriter, novelist,
essayist. He is also a provocateur who once described
Glamour,
of a street-smart variety, surrounds Mr. Kureishi. He likes to affect the
outlaw image: the fashionable ponytail, the black leather jacket, the beer in a
bottle, not a glass. Some in the film world call him the Spike Lee of England.
Asked about the comparison, Mr. Kureishi shrugged. "We don't really have
that much in common, except that he's a black man in a white society, and I'm a
brown man in a white society, and we're both young."
In
"Laundrette"
remains the standard for the dream product: a low-cost slice-of-life drama that
found an audience all over the world. Made on a budget of $860,000, it grossed
$5 million in the
But
neither of these big names is involved with "London Kills Me"; Mr.
Kureishi was on his own. He gazed up at the ominous-looking hole. "What if
the ceiling falls in?" he asked one of the technicians.
"I've
got a dustpan and brush downstairs, Hanif."
Mr.
Kureishi smiled at the joke. Orson Welles once called film making the greatest
toy-train set in the world, and Mr. Kureishi was obviously relishing his new
toy. Some years ago, when he was asked if he had any aspirations to direct, he
replied, "No, it's too bloody difficult, too much organization. All of
those people you have to be nice to. It's a strain." But here he was, on
the second day of a scheduled 38-day shoot, being nice to people, organized,
dealing with the strain.
The
cast of unknowns were mostly in their early 20's, and they treated the quiet
Mr. Kureishi as a hip, friendly teacher, or maybe an older brother. He doesn't
look like a film director; short and compactly built, he has long black hair
and gentle, soft black eyes. His face is angelic, but he is slow to smile and
slower to laugh, often affecting the kind of puzzled expression and crooked
grin one sees in pouting children and hurt dogs.
Not
everything Mr. Kureishi has written, ranging from stage plays and screenplays
to essays, stories and a novel, has been a striking success, but the title of
his new film is certainly ironic in light of his own career.
Although
the movie was a commercial and critical failure, it further established Mr.
Kureishi as a writer of vision. He has consistently challenged the Merchant
Ivory-Masterpiece Theater view of
"London
Kills Me," unlike Mr. Kureishi's other screenplays, doesn't feature race
as an issue; the film is about a young white street urchin called Clint
Eastwood who meets up with a gang of white drug dealers and moves into a squat,
or house, with them in Notting Hill. Clint wants to go straight but needs a
pair of shoes to get a job. "About two years ago, I met this guy in
Notting Hill who didn't have a pair of shoes," Mr. Kureishi explained.
"He'd stolen a pair from someone in his squat, but they'd found out, so he
had to give them back. It seemed sort of funny and pathetic to me -- that all
he needed was a pair of shoes."
But
the film is not about footware. "Drugs are
high-risk capitalism," the director said, speaking the kind of lines he is
apt to give his characters. "Ecstasy was the ultimate Thatcherite
drug, because you could get blissed out on the
weekend and still go to work Monday morning. Not like LSD. The kids around
The
house the producers found is a former meditation center
about to undergo complete renovation. "London Kills Me" turned it
into a cinematic squat, with unintelligible graffiti spray-painted on the
walls, mirrors smashed, the carpets trashed. Budgeted at $3 million, the
production is clearly on the low end of the scale.
"People
will probably say the film is arrogant," Mr. Kureishi said. What do
critics say about him? "His eagerness to shock is almost endearing,"
wrote James Wolcott in Vanity Fair. "Kureishi is a bourgeois-basher afraid
of being branded bourgeois."
Mr.
Kureishi, whose novel won the Whitbread Prize for the best British fiction
debut of 1990, has been praised by his friend Salman
Rushdie, but, like Mr. Rushdie, he is not the most admired writer in the
British Asian community. The loudest critics of "My Beautiful
Laundrette" were Asians. In
Although
Muslim characters are written about sympathetically in his novel, Mr. Kureishi
said that he was brought up as an atheist. Born in 1954 to a working-class
English mother and a middle-class Pakistani journalist, he grew up in the south
There
were few Asians in the Bromley area then. "It was a very worrying
time," said Mr. Kureishi's father, Rafiushan, in
an interview during the shooting of "London Kills Me." (Rafiushan Kureishi died last January.) "The English nature
is to not say anything openly, but to keep it under. But people became
outspoken about race -- they gave you a hassle when you went out." The
senior Kureishi, perhaps his son's greatest champion, remembered the young Hanif as being "very difficult and extremely rude at
times. He could be very arrogant."
Having
come of age in the late 60's, the director has put that era's
anti-authoritarian sensibility into much of his work. The land squatters in
"Sammy and Rosie" could be living in a 60's commune. Characters speak
as if they're in a psychedelic Roger Corman film
("This stuff will chill you, man. Just tip it on your tongue . . .
.") And the drug dealers in "London Kills Me" could have been
Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters hot off the bus.
Of
his new film, Mr. Kureishi said, "There'll be a lot of people who'll be
expecting something which is much bigger and more complicated, I suppose, more
ambitious."
Faltering
ambition has never been a problem with Mr. Kureishi. These days, however,
following his father's death and a bout with back problems, he has decided to
travel and take it easy for a while. Although he has no new projects planned,
he has written a four-hour television adaptation of "The Buddha of
Suburbia," which the BBC plans to film in September. This time, though, he
is content to let someone else direct.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DD1E30F931A3575BC0A964958260
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Emma Corbín García
emcorgar @alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press