My Beautiful Laundrette (1985): Desire in Thatcher's England

The World

The England of My Beautiful Laundrette is Thatcher's England: a country mid-transformation, where the old certainties — class, community, the post-war settlement — are being dismantled and replaced with enterprise culture and the injunction to get on your bike. Kureishi's screenplay inhabits this world with the authority of someone who grew up in it.

Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is the son of a Pakistani intellectual — a former journalist, now a gentle alcoholic, whose socialist idealism has curdled into disappointed observation. His uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) has made his peace with Thatcherism more aggressively: he runs businesses, drives a Mercedes, keeps a white mistress. He gives Omar a rundown laundrette to manage.

Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an old schoolfriend of Omar's — white, working-class, drifting, formerly involved with the National Front. He turns up at the laundrette. Omar gives him a job. And then something else begins, which both of them pretend is not beginning.

The Desire

The love affair between Omar and Johnny is the centre of the film and its most radical element. It is not presented as a problem, not hedged with qualification or regret. They desire each other, they act on that desire, and the film treats this as a fact of the same order as any other fact in the story — no more scandalous than the racism of Johnny's former friends, no more remarkable than the corruption of Nasser's business dealings.

Kureishi has said that he wanted to write a gay relationship that was simply part of the landscape — not the film's subject, but one of its given conditions. He largely succeeded. The relationship between Omar and Johnny is the warmest thing in a film full of warmth, and it is surrounded by enough other complexity — race, class, family, money — that it never becomes a thesis.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Day-Lewis had made films before My Beautiful Laundrette — including, in the same year, his breakthrough in A Room with a View — but Johnny is the performance that announced who he was going to be. He plays Johnny with a physical intelligence that makes every gesture specific: the way he moves through the laundrette he has helped build, the way he looks at Omar, the way his body changes when the NF boys arrive.

The performance is not about Johnny's conflict between his racist past and his present desire. It is about a man who has already made his choice — who chose Omar, chose the laundrette, chose the life — and is simply living inside that choice. The film's confidence in Johnny, its refusal to make him prove himself through suffering, is one of its most generous qualities.

The Politics

My Beautiful Laundrette is a political film in the way that the best political films are: through character, not argument. Its politics emerge from the specific people it follows rather than from speeches or confrontations.

The racism is present and real — Johnny's former friends, the broader hostility of a white working-class community toward Pakistani business success — but the film is not a film about racism. It is a film about people navigating a world structured by racism, alongside everything else that structures their lives: money, family expectation, desire, ambition. The complexity is in the navigation, not the structure.

Kureishi was writing from his own experience — mixed-race, British-Pakistani, living through exactly the England the film depicts — and the authority of that experience is everywhere in the screenplay.

The Laundrette

The laundrette itself — the physical space that Omar and Johnny create together, the neon-lit interior with its Italian marble and its aspirational excess — is a character in the film. It is their world: built by their labour, owned by their relationship, the concrete embodiment of what two men can make when they decide to make something together.

The scene in which the laundrette opens for business, everything working, the neon on, both men proud — is one of the most quietly joyful scenes in British cinema.

BoysDo understands that gay desire does not exist in isolation — it exists inside lives that are also about class, race, family, ambition, and the specific weight of a particular historical moment. *My Beautiful Laundrette* understands this completely. It is a film that treats gay desire as real and worthy of serious attention, and embeds it in a world complex enough to deserve that attention.

It also makes something beautiful out of it. The laundrette glows. The men love each other. In 1985, that was a radical act.