Adaptations Good and Bad

Brick Lane - 4/5

Director Sarah Gavron's adaptation of Monica Ali's controversial novel tells the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who arrives in Britain for an arranged marriage with an older man, Chanu. Almost two decades later, she has two daughters and lives a very subdued life until hot-headed young muslim Karim comes knocking at her door, setting her off on the road of self-discovery and coming to life.

The cinematography is beautiful and stunning throughout, especially in the early scenes in Bangladesh, but also in the some of the later London scenes as Nazneen awakens to the world around her. I've not read the book, but I understand that the film makes large omissions including many of the more controversial elements, but what is left is an engaging story that flirts with being a romance and edges onto political drama as the events of 9-11 dramatically alter Nazneen's world, but is ultimately a very personal tale.

Tannishtha Chatterjee gives a superbly restrained performance in the lead, conveying as much with her silent looks and with her words. Christopher Simpson is edgy enough as Karim to cast doubts over the romance (note the clips from Brief Encounter in the background) without ever becoming a real bad guy. Whilst Satish Kaushik as Chanu is brilliant - he brings the film much of its humour through his attempts to better himself and deceive himself and others. At other moments he seems to be veering towards an abusive figure but always manages to pull himself back and finishes the film with a considerable amount of respect and dignity and, probably, sympathy from the audience.

All in all, its a wonderfully shot and well-acted engaging story of one person's experience of changing culture's.



Sleuth - 2/5

The original movie of Sleuth, starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, is a wonderful film - managing to be both dark and fun and utterly engaging in the battle between two men, trying to outwit each other whilst fighting over the same woman. That said, its little enough seen these days to make a remake worth while and on paper this should be brilliant - Caine in the Olivier role, Jude Law in the Caine role, directed by Kenneth Branagh from a script by Harold Pinter. What results is a bit of a ghastly mess - OK, if you've not seen the original, it might make for passable entertainment and its probably not quite as bad as some reviews make out.

So where did it go so wrong. Not with the acting - Law and Caine both do excellent jobs with the material that is presented and make it at least watchable. Branagh's direction is interesting rather than effective and sometimes distracts rather than compliments the action. But the real weakness is in Pinter's script. Strictly speaking this is a re-adaptation of the original stageplay, rather than a remake of the 70s film, but that matters little - the script has little of the subtlety and none of the fun of the original. He replaces coherent character motivation with having Caine and Law say f*** and c*** alot and by changing the underlying tension between them from a matter of class to one of sex, loses alot of what made it such an enjoyable two-hander. What we are left with is dark and twisted, but not much fun.

The best that can be hoped for from this is that it might prompt a high profile re-issue of the original on DVD for more people to discover its delights.