When Daniel Day-Lewis’s Star Was Born |
Daniel Day-Lewis stuck out his tongue, and a star was born. It’s maybe not quite as simple as that, but the quick, romantic moment in 1986’s My Beautiful Laundrette—so iconic it was the cover of the film’s Criterion edition—is one of many that revealed the then 28-year-old Day-Lewis as someone to watch. The film earned just one Oscar nomination, for Hanif Kureishi’s original screenplay, but it was the beginning of a meteoric rise for Day-Lewis, now a three-time Oscar winner and almost universally regarded as the world’s greatest living actor.
But all that acclaim still may not prepare you for My Beautiful Laundrette, the subject of this week’s Pride Oscar Flashback on Little Gold Men. Day-Lewis stars opposite Gordon Warnecke as Omar, a young Pakistani British man whose wealthy uncle puts him in charge of a foundering South London laundromat. He’s caught between his uncle’s capitalist dreams of making it big in Britain, “a country we hate and love,” and his father, an intellectual now sunk into alcoholism, who only wants Omar to go to college. And in addition to all of that, Omar reunites with Day-Lewis’s Johnny, a street punk who hangs around with the kind of friends who would tell Pakistani immigrants to go back to where they came from. But Johnny and Omar have picked back up their romantic relationship, renovating the laundrette together and building toward a future beyond all those external pressures. |
Omar and Johnny’s relationship is a secret, but beyond that My Beautiful Laundrette is not really concerned with homophobia, allowing their romance to flourish in scenes that are cheeky, sometimes funny, and still very sexy nearly 40 years later. That furtive lick happens on the sidewalk outside the laundrette, where Omar and Johnny embrace specifically to annoy the street punks lingering outside; Johnny sticks out his tongue, invisible to the onlookers, in a moment that Frears supposedly devised while filming. You can’t exactly tell in that moment that this is the man who will eventually become Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview and Abraham Lincoln—but it’s easy to imagine that moviegoers will spend the next 40 years unable to take their eyes off him. |
No comments:
Post a Comment