Joining the World

As a girl, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) loved her life. And no wonder: in Bangladesh, she’s surrounded by beautiful song, lush sentiment, and brilliant color. “There’s a song in my head,” she says in voiceover, as her charming child-self scampers across her memory with her sister Hasina (Zafreen). “No one spoke of our mother’s death,” she says. “Our fate was decided then.”

So now you know: the idyll in India is pierced by trauma. Her mother’s suicide by drowning leaves Nazneen and her sister adrift, though not for long. Within the first few minutes of Brick Lane, based on Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Nazneen is married as a child and sent to live in London’s East End, while Hasina “stays.” The film’s transition to 20 years later in Brick Lane, emphasizes close spaces. Opposed to her nostalgic recollection of her blissful mobility in India, here she’s confined by a series of small rooms and doorways, narrow streets and muted colors. Whether seeing her two daughters off to school or her husband Chanu (Satish Kaushik) to work, Nazneen looks depressed, her body unslumped only when she finds a letter from her sister in the post. 

While the reading of these letters and her writing in response provide glimpses into Nazneen’s own nostalgia, they don’t tell much about her perception of her current life (except to reinforce her unhappiness, which is clear enough). It’s initially ironic that she’s invested in this traditional fantasy while Chanu has his own archaic notions (she should be modest, stay home, and see to his needs), but her horizons will expand as his contract. Indeed, Chanu embodies the full extent of Nazneen’s loneliness and limitation, lumpy and sputtering, desperately uninterested in his wife even when he has sex with her (the rolling off rendered in background as the camera grants a long look at Nazneen’s impassive face, which he briefly touches, wheezing).

When he loses his job, Chanu is at once wounded and imperious, insisting that he’ll follow up on “very good leads” in the morning, posturing before his wife’s visible disappointment. Nazneen doesn’t wait long before she finds work herself, taking in sewing after she observes a neighbor do it. Chanu is undone, explaining, “If the wife is working it’s because the man cannot put food on the table,” but Nazneen is feeling new independence, and so presses on, resentful of Chanu’s failures and conscious—at least intermittently—of oldest daughter Shahana’s (Naeema Begum) teenaged judgments.

Nazneen’s independence is both enhanced and recontained by an affair with Karim (Christopher Simpson), the handsome young man who delivers clothes to her apartment. Here Sarah Gavron’s movie lapses into a series of clichés. As their conversation is minimal, the relationship is limited to familiar representations (soft-filtered close-ups of beautiful body parts, Nazneen’s contemplative, appreciative expressions) and political metaphors. To its credit, the film allows that Nazneen’s exposure to the outside world is briefly complicated, as Karim leans increasingly toward radical Islam (in response to post-9/11 racism in the neighborhood, the film’s allusion to other piercing traumas) and Shahana brings home stories of a mixed-race existence, among her classmates and her romantic yearnings.

Karim’s group invites its members to “join the world” in resisting racism and asserting themselves. But Nazneen seeks another sort of connection. At the same time, she faces the truth of her husband. Chanu is not, as the film intimates at first, stereotypically oafish, selfish, and smug; he is instead less oppressive than insecure, more confused than loutish. Much of this revelation is owed to Kaushik’s subtle performance (a brief family outing scene helps as well). As Nazneen is caught among possibilities that lie outside her lost and longed-for idyll, she has to make choices. That she can finally comprehend Chanu’s complications alongside her own—as they are different as well as connected—suggests that Nazneen is learning to see outside her usual frames.