My Beautiful Laundrette · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Opening night at Powders. The neon is on, the street outside is dark, and for once the launderette is throwing more light onto South London than South London ever threw on it. Nasser dances with Rachel among the machines. Behind the back-room glass, hidden from the party and fully visible to us, Omar and Johnny have each other. Frears holds both rooms in one optical field and cuts between them until you can no longer say which one the scene is about.

Stay with that pane of glass. It carries the whole film.

Deleuze has a name for what glass does to a shot: the crystal-image. It's a moment when the actual thing and its virtual double, the body and its reflection, stop being sortable. Neither one comes first, both are real, and the image starts circulating between them. Cinema falls into this every time it shoots through a window, and Frears and Oliver Stapleton shoot nearly everything through something. Windows, mirrors, the porthole doors of the machines. Characters are refracted, overlaid, watching from outside. It's a grammar for who is permitted inside which space. It is also a fair description of being British and Pakistani in 1985: in the room and on the pane at the same time, in the country and reflected back at it.

You could put all that glass down to the budget. Sixteen millimetre, six weeks, real shopfronts, shoot what's there. That reading is available and it's too small, because the device is far too consistent to be luck, and because Frears took it from somewhere exact. Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul had already framed an interracial couple through doorways and glass while hostile onlookers held the frame in static tableau. Laundrette inherits that composition and heats it up. Fassbinder's onlookers freeze the couple. Frears lets his couple use the glass as cover.

Deleuze adds that a crystal can be flawed, and that the fissure is what lets something escape a world with no outside. Powders is close to a perfect crystal: sealed, mirrored, lit, capital converted straight into light, a place people come to watch rather than to wash. The back room is the crack in it. The one thing in the building the enterprise can't bill for is happening on the far side of the glass while the money celebrates itself out front.

Now the colour, which Deleuze takes seriously. A colour-image, in his sense, is a colour that soaks up a scene instead of describing it. British realism had spent twenty-five years making grey a moral position: grey means honest, means poor, means look what's been done to these people. Stapleton lights this film with sodium orange, fluorescent green and neon, and the moral position goes out with the grey. His Britain is shabby and lit up. Refusing the palette was as political as anything in the dialogue.

Which raises what the film did to storytelling. Deleuze splits the action film in two. In the large form, a big situation bears down until somebody acts and transforms it, the shape of nearly every message picture. In the small form, the act comes first and discloses a situation you were never shown. Laundrette is small form all the way down. Nobody explains Thatcherism; somebody hands Omar a key. Mick Audsley's cutting begins scenes late and ends them early, and the drug deal, the property dealings and the mechanics of the renovation all happen in the transitions. Deleuze calls that elliptical gesture an index of lack: a gesture pointing at a situation the film declines to stage. It is the exact inverse of the social-problem picture, which exists to stage the situation. It is also why the film is funny. Comedy runs on ellipsis, on what you're left to work out.

Frears's own invention is the tonal splice: a comedy of aspiration laid over a substrate of racial violence, cut so each interrupts the other and neither cancels out. The skinheads are never far. They are the adjacent, implied space outside every shot through the shopfront, the out-of-field the frame keeps gesturing at. That's the nerve you can hear in the speed of the shoot.

Then the parallel montage. Griffith built convergent cross-cutting to put a threat and a rescue on one clock. Frears reroutes the machine: sex, a dance and a cash-flow triumph converge into a single event, and the convergence isn't a rescue, it's the discovery that these are one appetite. Nasser dancing with his white mistress on the floor of a launderette he owns, in front of machines his nephew bought with a dealer's money, is what Deleuze calls a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone naming it. Nobody in that shot says the word landlord.

The politics arrive by the same indirect route. Deleuze's late argument is that the old political cinema spoke for a people who already existed, while modern political cinema has to begin from the fact that the people are missing, not yet formed, not available to be represented. Its work becomes fabulation: catching people in the act of legending themselves. Omar rebranding a dying launderette as Powders and switching on the sign is legending. So is Johnny, formerly of the National Front, taking wages from a schoolfriend. Kureishi refused to hand anyone a single unified community; his Pakistani characters are entrepreneurs, adulterers, landlords and wits. Some Pakistani organisations in Britain and America protested. Deleuze would say the protest names precisely what the film got right, that a missing people gets invented by such fictions rather than depicted by them.

The debts are legible. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning gave Frears the working-class interior as a diagram of social position and a scheming protagonist the film declines to punish. A Taste of Honey gave him Lassally's handheld available-light location work and, more to the point, a gay character simply living in the house, with no disclosure scene, no diagnosis, no death, the refusal Laundrette gets credited with codifying and in fact inherited. Nighthawks proved on 16mm that gay London could be filmed as texture and routine instead of crisis. Bloody Kids was Frears's own rehearsal, Chris Menges lighting nocturnal deindustrialised England with sodium and neon practicals, the method Stapleton carries straight into Powders. Moonlighting supplied Stanley Myers and the idea of a single London work site as the entire political arena. The method is Bazinian in its bones, real streets and available light and ambiguity left in the shot, but Bazin's realists went out to find the world's ambiguity and Frears went out to find its colour and its jokes.

What it seeded was partly industrial. For the rest of the decade British features were financed as television films and released as cinema, and critics have argued ever since about whether that saved the national cinema or shrank it. The lasting inheritance is the other thing: a way of filming people who live between worlds that doesn't require a confession scene, a victim, or a grey sky.

So watch the glass rather than the plot. And then ask the question the film leaves open, and never answers: is the crack in the crystal a way out, or just one more room the money paid for?