Great Moments in Gayness: "Waiting for Omar"
Thursday, June 27, 2013 at 11:00AM Team Experience is celebrating Gay Pride Week with their favorite moments in gay cinema. Here's David on a 1986 classic introducing a certain 3 time Oscar winner... Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!
In my experience, it’s always worth waiting for Omar.”
One of my favourite LGBT movies will always be Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, one of the most important and political British films of the 1980s, but also one that was important to the development of my own sexual identity in the calmer climbs of the mid-2000s. It was the first Film Studies class my school had ever taught, I’d just fallen in love with cinema over the summer, and I was a sixteen-year-old struggling with his ‘different’ sexual feelings – there was basically a lot of late blooming going on. [more]
My Beautiful Laundrette’s strongest quality might be the cheeky, straightforward manner in which it presents every one of its rebellious elements, crossing the thick Thatcherite boundaries related to everything from race to social class to religion. Hanif Kureishi’s typically teasing and provocative script mines the energy and resourcefulness of youth, as it rubs up against the staunch traditions of the older generations.
As an impressionable teenager, though, it was being confronted with images of gay sexuality – for, at least as I remember it, the first time – that really made the film so memorable. Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young second-generation Pakistani, is given a laundrette to run by his entrepreneur uncle. When he runs into his schoolfriend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), a neo-Nazi punk, he employs him to fix up the laundrette.
Their reunion immediately suggests a history between the two, as they grin at each other and embrace in full view of both Omar’s family and Johnny’s extremist comrades, either oblivious or careless of any judgment or suspicions. Thereafter, theirs is a relationship lived secretly but not in shame, constantly flirting with the thrill of discovery and exposure, from their first (on-screen) kiss under a dark bridge…
Has DDL ever been hotter?
Reader Comments (7)
Oh, how I love this movie! And no, DDL has never been hotter (except MAYBE in Last of the Mohicans), or more fun to watch, frankly. After this, it was all ACTING! from him. Very nice write-up!
If you haven't read Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it's a really nice complement to this film. Same time period and a lot of the same themes, but in a different level of wealth.
I loved this movie too. I liked the sweetness of the romance, and I was amused by how the people who were against their union were confused about what they wanted to complain about first: class differences, ethnicity, or gayness. As I recall, it seemed to be class differences that they really couldn't get over.
I can't possibly overstate the importance of this movie in my perception of myself as a gay person. The only other thing that came close at the time was Almodovar. A movie with a gay couple as the "heroes" or at least the least messed up was a revelation. Up till then they'd just been suicidal or murderers.
Here's another one who loves this movie.
I wonder if there's any other recent politician who has provoked the existence of so many movies as Thatcher and the so called Thatcherism. So from that perspective, I guess it's just fair she had her own biopic.
Will there be movies about Merkelism in the future? I hope not.
One of my all time favourites. And like David, it was one of my first experiences with not just homosexuality, but open homosexuality and seeing it as not a tragic disease that'll lead to death.
I love this film, it's very subtle 👌 Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing and Stephen Frears a genius.