"Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive is up for grabs. And what do we find in the empire's night ashes. Punks and ghosts and madmen dancing in the carnage or singing a Motown medley as all the survivors copulate on Armageddon Eve." (Richard Corless)
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), about the secretive romance between a young British Pakistani (Gordon Warnecke) and a racist punk (Daniel Day-Lewis), won Hanif Kureishi an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay and instant acclaim for its satirical account of life in mid-1980s London. Not everyone loved it though. Oxford historian Norman Stone criticised for "shrieking at Thatcher" and its "overall feeling of disgust and decay". In New York, 300 men from the Pakistani Action Committee demonstrated outside a theatre where it was screening; their placard read - "This film is the product of a vile and perverted mind."
Kureishi's follow-up Sammy and Rosie Get Laid upped the ante. Originally entitled 'The Fuck', and partly inspired by the mass riots that followed the police shooting of Cherry Groce, the unarmed mother of an Afro-Caribbean suspect, it's a diffuse, ghostly, often anarchic urban heterotopia. It features Shashi Kapoor as a murderous Pakistani politician who returns to London to resume his youthful relationship with an English 'rose', Fine Young Cannibals singer Roland Gift as a libidinal drifter, an American photographer working on an exhibition called 'Images of a Decaying Europe', lots of sex, lots of rioting....
The Pakistani Action Committee was not impressed....
"In the universities," wrote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "our colleagues, our students, who are very politically correct, don't quite have the wherewithal to read these films..."
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid has never been released on DVD.
THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE (est. 2007): falling and laughing...