Yesterday was a work and TV film day. I had hoped to experience Brick Lane in theatre but its circulation was limited. Brick Lane is an area of London in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets from Bethnal Green through to Spitalfields which what used to be London's main fruit and vegetable market but since it was moved operations has become a lively large indoor general market open seven days a week with Sunday being the most popular day, and hen the Lane continues to Whitechapel where the infamous Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper took place. So much for the headline stuff. In fact the area has been the home of immigrants for the past two centuries commencing with Irish weavers, then the Ashkenazi Jews who developed the local industry with tailoring as well as cloth making and then in the latter part of the twentieth century, the displaced Muslims of Bangladesh. This influx led to a predominant Methodist Chapel being converted into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue and then in 1976 the same building became a Mosque. The area became well known for its inexpensive alcohol free curry houses and more recently for art and fashion and student accommodation with several exhibition areas to show work.
Brick Lane based on a 2003 novel led to controversy when plans were announced for the film to be shot in the area because Bangladeshi religious and community leaders were strongly opposed to aspects of how their community was being represented. It is a reality that religious controlled communities always complain the loudest when one of their own attempts to separate truth from delusion and fantasy. In fact I did not think the film was intended as a polemic about arranged marriages, the treatment of women and girls as slaves to their husbands, or how vulnerable and uneducated immigrants are exploited by theoretical revolutionaries and fanatics with missions who have no regard for the very people they use to pursue their ambitions and no regard for human life. Such people need to be stopped and the best way is to educate and address the genuine grievances of those whose naivety and trust they abuse.
The hero of Brick Lane is not just the female lead, effectively sold into a loveless marriage as a young girl to a much older, fat, educated and English loving Indian man with ambitions he is unable to realise. From the outset he is destined to be a failure, lacking real understanding of society where he hopes make his fortune and find family happiness or understand human relationships in a contemporary western capitalist society, especially aspirations of teenage girls educated in such a society.
For the first decade and a half of her married life the obvious heroine in the film remains trapped in her cultural background and girlhood dreams. She keeps in contact with her sister who she writes regularly about her dreams of a return to her home, saving what she can and which leads her to buying a second hand sewing machine and commencing to work in their house for the return home fare. She continues to grieve for her first born who died in infancy and finds it difficult to cope with her first born English educated daughter who find her mother's acceptance of the way her father runs the household unacceptable and this includes her mother's unwillingness to tell her husband what she actually thinks and feels.
The inevitable happens and the wife commences an affair with someone younger than herself who becomes quickly caught up with the extremism post 9/11. It is only when this happens that she considers leaving her husband that she begins to see him in a new light as he also emerges to an equal hero, a man of courage and conviction. For it is he who stands up against the extremists and at a public meeting which has called for the community to defend itself, he reminds of the history of what Muslim has done to Muslim by the million upon million in the Indian sub continent and it is he who in effect frees his wife and daughters to become the person she and they, want to be. The film ending stands in the class of Shakespearean tragedies, for at the very point when she is able to see her husband in the round and also the young militant as he is they part, because respective need for survival, he is to return to India and she to remain with her daughters. For me the most important statement in the film comes at the end when the wife who is also the narrator realises that there is more than one form of love and cries out against her upbringing, why did no one tell me this?
In many ways there is more in common between Brick Lane and the Duchess than time and cultures separate.
The varying nature of love and sex is also the main theme of the Diana Keaton and Albert Finney version of Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Look Back in Anger, called Shoot the Moon. These days for many of the present generation, marriage and children is followed by finding that one married the wrong person, divorce, remarriage and coping with two sets, and sometimes three sets of children's, has almost become a rite of passage into adulthood, a concept which I owe to Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat. This film deals with how in such a situations individuals are destroyed, children suffer lasting damage and sometimes although adults can rebuild their lives and regain self respect and achieve new meaning and purpose, but usually at a high price. My problem with the film is that I am not sure who will enjoy or benefit from the film unless one is a sado-masochist or wants reassurance that the hell one is undergoing is normal for the situation. Given that the cinema audience at weekends is mainly teenagers embarking of the first serious relationship it will not serve as a cautionary tale. One has only to look at the figures about young people taking up smoking or drinking and driving and rest to know they have to make their own mistakes and hope someone will be there to help pick up the pieces if asked.
For the rest of the day I worked consistently, bringing myself up to-date and on target for the monthly 100 additional sets. I enjoyed the Parallel Olympic review where more stories of individual achievement cheered up spirits although the athletics team is failing as did the more able bodied. One hopes the new performance director will have the right qualities to avoid further embarrassment, although it is a good thing if the population switched from walking and running to cycling as long as this promotes the development of cycle ways and cycle tracks. I enjoyed the sea bass which was chunky but not as well flavoured as some before. The black ink cartridges arrived by post and I advised the supplier of the quarterly wine case of the correct credit cards details. The second occasion that records appeared to have been corrupted by someone. Curious.
Brick Lane based on a 2003 novel led to controversy when plans were announced for the film to be shot in the area because Bangladeshi religious and community leaders were strongly opposed to aspects of how their community was being represented. It is a reality that religious controlled communities always complain the loudest when one of their own attempts to separate truth from delusion and fantasy. In fact I did not think the film was intended as a polemic about arranged marriages, the treatment of women and girls as slaves to their husbands, or how vulnerable and uneducated immigrants are exploited by theoretical revolutionaries and fanatics with missions who have no regard for the very people they use to pursue their ambitions and no regard for human life. Such people need to be stopped and the best way is to educate and address the genuine grievances of those whose naivety and trust they abuse.
The hero of Brick Lane is not just the female lead, effectively sold into a loveless marriage as a young girl to a much older, fat, educated and English loving Indian man with ambitions he is unable to realise. From the outset he is destined to be a failure, lacking real understanding of society where he hopes make his fortune and find family happiness or understand human relationships in a contemporary western capitalist society, especially aspirations of teenage girls educated in such a society.
For the first decade and a half of her married life the obvious heroine in the film remains trapped in her cultural background and girlhood dreams. She keeps in contact with her sister who she writes regularly about her dreams of a return to her home, saving what she can and which leads her to buying a second hand sewing machine and commencing to work in their house for the return home fare. She continues to grieve for her first born who died in infancy and finds it difficult to cope with her first born English educated daughter who find her mother's acceptance of the way her father runs the household unacceptable and this includes her mother's unwillingness to tell her husband what she actually thinks and feels.
The inevitable happens and the wife commences an affair with someone younger than herself who becomes quickly caught up with the extremism post 9/11. It is only when this happens that she considers leaving her husband that she begins to see him in a new light as he also emerges to an equal hero, a man of courage and conviction. For it is he who stands up against the extremists and at a public meeting which has called for the community to defend itself, he reminds of the history of what Muslim has done to Muslim by the million upon million in the Indian sub continent and it is he who in effect frees his wife and daughters to become the person she and they, want to be. The film ending stands in the class of Shakespearean tragedies, for at the very point when she is able to see her husband in the round and also the young militant as he is they part, because respective need for survival, he is to return to India and she to remain with her daughters. For me the most important statement in the film comes at the end when the wife who is also the narrator realises that there is more than one form of love and cries out against her upbringing, why did no one tell me this?
In many ways there is more in common between Brick Lane and the Duchess than time and cultures separate.
The varying nature of love and sex is also the main theme of the Diana Keaton and Albert Finney version of Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Look Back in Anger, called Shoot the Moon. These days for many of the present generation, marriage and children is followed by finding that one married the wrong person, divorce, remarriage and coping with two sets, and sometimes three sets of children's, has almost become a rite of passage into adulthood, a concept which I owe to Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat. This film deals with how in such a situations individuals are destroyed, children suffer lasting damage and sometimes although adults can rebuild their lives and regain self respect and achieve new meaning and purpose, but usually at a high price. My problem with the film is that I am not sure who will enjoy or benefit from the film unless one is a sado-masochist or wants reassurance that the hell one is undergoing is normal for the situation. Given that the cinema audience at weekends is mainly teenagers embarking of the first serious relationship it will not serve as a cautionary tale. One has only to look at the figures about young people taking up smoking or drinking and driving and rest to know they have to make their own mistakes and hope someone will be there to help pick up the pieces if asked.
For the rest of the day I worked consistently, bringing myself up to-date and on target for the monthly 100 additional sets. I enjoyed the Parallel Olympic review where more stories of individual achievement cheered up spirits although the athletics team is failing as did the more able bodied. One hopes the new performance director will have the right qualities to avoid further embarrassment, although it is a good thing if the population switched from walking and running to cycling as long as this promotes the development of cycle ways and cycle tracks. I enjoyed the sea bass which was chunky but not as well flavoured as some before. The black ink cartridges arrived by post and I advised the supplier of the quarterly wine case of the correct credit cards details. The second occasion that records appeared to have been corrupted by someone. Curious.
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