As with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, causing a furore amongst uptight communities is easy, particularly as they seldom go to the trouble of acquiring any first-hand experience of what's caused them to bay for blood or have an understanding that fiction means it's not a bloody documentary. It also obfuscates a normal response to the work in question, so when you finally get to the troublestarter, it can't help seeming innocuous compared to the hype. And so with this version of Monica Ali's novel, which had to find a host of locations to replace the out-of-bounds real Brick Lane despite containing little we haven't seen before in a host of other literary and filmic takes on a traditional, oppressive Asian way of family life being challenged in a modern Britain. The only major variation is that the conflict is wholly acted out within the Bengali community itself and doesn't rely on white British characters to bring in a range of values threatening to their conservatism. More specifically, the conflict is for the heart and mind of its narrator, Nazneen, torn between her arranged marriage to a feckless lump and a fling with a hunky Anglified idealist.
It's full of beautiful images and moves, like its protagonist, with a careful sensitivity, but suffers heavily from its literary origins, leading to a lot of Paulo Coelhoesque internal monologue and not much for the actress to do but look anxious or melancholy. And when the moment of catharsis finally comes, clunky lines show the fuzzy grasp the script has on its characters as real entities.
5/10
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