‘The jewel in the jacksie of south London this place’ll be!” Now getting a 40th anniversary rerelease, this classic Brit comedy from screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and director Stephen Frears has for me the jaunty spirit of Ealing, maybe because the bleeping, burping, bubbling musical theme feels like a recurrent motif in The Man in the White Suit. It’s a vibrant, funny, complicated allegory of a down-at-heel launderette in a dreary London parade of shops, which gets laundered and cleaned up by south Asians who are subjected to nothing but racist abuse. It was formerly called Churchill’s Laundrette and now cheekily renamed Powders, in homage to washing powder or to income from a different powder which this place is going to launder.
It is a sharp, smart picture, with English eccentricity, sly quirk and political subversion, that represents a brilliant and almost unique engagement with contemporary history in 80s British cinema: a satire of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain which involved playing Toryism at its own game. This was the world in which the Conservative government brought in the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to bring down the unemployment-claimant figures, but found that immigration stimulated enterprise. Kureishi’s writing was part of the new energy of postcolonial literature; it came from the same place as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet.
