My Beautiful Laundrette

[With Gay Pride festivities happening in various cities in June, we'll take a look back at a few gay classics. Here's Matthew Eng (who you'll remember from a couple of American Hustle pieces) on an Oscar nominated 80s classic - Editor]

Initially envisioned as a low-budget, Channel 4 telefilm, My Beautiful Laundrette cheekily challenged the Western moviegoing market upon its U.K. and U.S. releases in, respectively, 1985 and ’86. It became an out-of-nowhere arthouse hit, all while ironically embracing and blending a distinctive, regional-specific grouping of Thatcher-era South Londoners who fall under social categorizations normally left discrete or disregarded in modern-day moviemaking, both then and now. In the film, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young, business-minded Pakistani-Brit, sets out to renovate his uncle’s dreary laundrette into a clothes-cleaning arcade, a luxury laundrette “as big as the Ritz.” To do this, Omar recruits Johnny, his white former classmate and one-time lover, resulting in all the charged, complicated power shifts that would inevitably stem from a South Asian British man employing his former skinhead ex-boyfriend in Thatcherite England.

Arguably the film’s greatest claim to fame is that the smirking, blonde-streaked, and neck-licking Johnny is played by an effortlessly charismatic and impossibly hot Daniel Day-Lewis, the only actor in the cast since allowed to top his work here (not to mention the only one still working, period) and whose strong turn in Laundrette—coupled with his amusingly meek snob in the same year’s Merchant-Ivory export A Room with a View—prompted a prize-winning stateside breakout...

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Great Moments in Gayness: "Waiting for Omar"

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]

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