My Beautiful Launderette

by Hanif Kureishi

  HANIF KUREISHI

  My Beautiful Laundrette

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  First showing

  My Beautiful Laundrette

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  My Beautiful Laundrette

  INTRODUCTION

  I wrote the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in my uncle’s house in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 1985, during the night. As I wrote, cocks crowed and the call to prayer reverberated through crackly speakers from a nearby mosque. It was impossible to sleep. One morning as I sat on the verandah having breakfast, I had a phone call from Howard Davies, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom I’d worked twice before. He wanted to direct Brecht’s Mother Courage, with Judi Dench in the lead role. He wanted me to adapt it.

  That summer, back in England and at Howard’s place in Stratford-upon-Avon, I sat in the orchard with two pads of paper in front of me: on one I rewrote My Beautiful Laundrette and on the other I adapted Brecht from a literal translation into language that could be spoken by the RSC actors.

  As Laundrette was the first film I’d written, and I was primarily a playwright, I wrote each scene of the film like a little scene for a play, with the action written like stage directions and with lots of dialogue. Then I’d cut most of the dialogue and add more stage directions, often set in cars, or with people running about, to keep the thing moving, since films required action.

  I’d had a couple of lunches with Karin Banborough of Channel Four. She wanted me to write something for Film on Four. I was extremely keen. For me Film on Four had taken over from the BBC’s Play For Today in presenting serious contemporary drama on TV to a wide audience. The work of TV writers like Alan Bennett (much of it directed by Stephen Frears), Dennis Potter, Harold Pinter, Alan Plater and David Mercer, influenced me greatly when I was young and living at home in the suburbs. On my way up to London the morning after a Play For Today I’d sit in the train listening to people discussing the previous night’s drama and interrupt them with my own opinions.

  The great advantage of TV drama was the people watched it; difficult, challenging things could be said about contemporary life. The theatre, despite the efforts of touring companies and so on, has failed to get its ideas beyond a small enthusiastic audience.

  When I finished a draft of My Beautiful Laundrette, and Mother Courage had gone into rehearsal, Karin Banborough, David Rose and I discussed directors for the film.

  A couple of days later I went to see a friend, David Gothard, who was then running Riverside Studios. I often went for a walk by the river in the early evening, and then I’d sit in David’s office. He always had the new books and the latest magazines; and whoever was appearing at Riverside would be around. Riverside stood for tolerance, scepticism and intelligence. The feeling there was that works of art, plays, books and so on, were important. This is a rare thing in England. For many writers, actors, dancers and artists, Riverside was what a university should be: a place to learn and talk and work and meet your contemporaries. There was no other place like it in London and David Gothard was the great encourager, getting work on and introducing people to one another.

  He suggested I ask Stephen Frears to direct the film. I thought this an excellent idea, except that I admired Frears too much to have the nerve to ring him. David Gothard did this and I cycled to Stephen’s house in Notting Hill, where he lived in a street known as ‘director’s row’ because of the number of film directors living there.

  He said he wanted to shoot my film in February. As it was November already I pointed out that February might be a little soon. Would there be time to prepare, to rewrite? But he had a theory: when you have a problem, he said, bring things forward; do them sooner rather than later. And anyway, February was a good month for him; he made his best films then; England looked especially unpleasant; and people worked faster in the cold.

  The producers, Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, Stephen had worked with before, on promos for rock bands. So the film was set up and I started to rewrite. Stephen and I had long talks, each of us pacing up and down the same piece of carpet, in different directions.

  The film started off as an epic. It was to be like The Godfather, opening in the past with the arrival of an immigrant family in England and showing their progress to the present. There were to be many scenes set in the 1950s; people would eat bread and dripping and get off boats a lot; there would be scenes of Johnny and Omar as children and large-scale set pieces of racist marches with scenes of mass violence.

  We soon decided it was impossible to make a film of such scale. That film is still to be made. Instead I set the film in the present, though references to the past remain.

  It was shot in six weeks in February and March in 1985 on a low budget and 16mm film. For this I was glad. There were no commercial pressures on us, no one had a lot of money invested in the film who would tell us what to do. And I was tired of seeing lavish films set in exotic locations; it seemed to me that anyone could make such films, providing they had an old book, a hot country, new technology and were capable of aiming the camera at an attractive landscape in the hot country in front of which stood a star in a perfectly clean costume delivering lines from the old book.

  We decided the film was to have gangster and thriller elements, since the gangster film is the form that corresponds most closely to the city, with its gangs and violence. And the film was to be an amusement, despite its references to racism, unemployment and Thatcherism. Irony is the modern mode, a way of commenting on bleakness and cruelty without falling into dourness and didacticism. And ever since the first time I heard people in a theatre laugh during a play of mine, I’ve wanted it to happen again and again.

  We found actors – Saeed Jaffrey, for whom I’d written the part; and Roshan Seth I’d seen in David Hare’s play Map Of The World, commanding that huge stage at the National with complete authority. I skidded through the snow to see Shirley Ann Field and on arriving at her flat was so delighted by her charm and enthusiasm, and so ashamed of the smallness of her part, that there and then I added the material about the magic potions, the moving furniture and the walking trousers. It must have seemed that the rest of the film was quite peripheral and she would be playing the lead in a kind of ‘Exorcist’ movie with a gay Pakistani, a drug-dealer and a fluff-drying spin-drier in the background.

  Soon we stood under railway bridges in Vauxhall at two in the morning in March; we knocked the back wall out of someone’s flat and erected a platform outside to serve as the balcony of Papa’s flat, which had so many railway lines dipping and criss-crossing beside and above it that inside it you shook like peas in maracas; in an old shop we built a laundrette of such authenticity that people came in off the street with their washing; and I stood on the set making up dialogue before the actors did it themselves, and added one or two new scenes.

  When shooting was finished and we had about two-and-a-quarter hours of material strung together, we decided to have a showing for a group of ‘wise ones’. They would be film directors, novelists and film writers who’d give us their opinions and thereby aid in editing the film. So I sat at the back of the small viewing cinema as they watched the film. We then cut forty-five minutes out.

  The film played at the Edinburgh Film Festival and then went into the cinema.

  The script printed here is the last draft before shooting. I haven’t attempted to update it or cut out the scenes which were not used in the final version, since it may be of interest to people to compare script with film.

  I must thank my friends Walter Donohue, David Gothard, Salman Rushdie, David Nokes and, of course, S
ally Whitman, without whom.

  My Beautiful Laundrette was first shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival in autumn 1985. The film opened at the London Film Festival on 15 November and was subsequently released at London cinemas on 16 November 1985.

  The cast included:

  JOHNNY Daniel Day Lewis

  GENGHIS Richard Graham

  SALIM Derrick Branche

  OMAR Gordon Warnecke

  PAPA Roshan Seth

  NASSER Saeed Jaffrey

  RACHEL Shirley Anne Field

  BILQUIS Charu Bala Choksi

  CHERRY Souad Faress

  TANIA Rita Wolf

  ZAKI Gurdial Sira

  MOOSE Stephen Marcus

  GANG MEMBER ONE Dawn Archibald

  GANG MEMBER TWO Jonathan Moore

  Photography Oliver Stapleton

  Film Editor Mick Audsley

  Desinger Hugo Luczyc Wyhowski

  Sound Recordist Albert Bailey

  Music Ludus Tonalis

  Casting Debbie McWilliams

  Costume Design Lindy Hemming

  Make-up Elaine Carew

  Screenplay Hanif Kureishi

  Producers Sarah Radclyffe and Tim Bevan

  Director Stephen Frears

  EXT. OUTSIDE A LARGE DETACHED HOUSE. DAY

  CHERRY and SALIM get out of their car. Behind them, the FOUR JAMAICANS get out of their car.

  CHERRY and SALIM walk towards the house. It is a large falling-down place, in South London. It’s quiet at the moment – early morning – but the ground floor windows are boarded up.

  On the boarded-up windows is painted: ‘Your greed will be the death of us all’ and ‘We will defeat the running wogs of capitalism’ and ‘Opium is the opium of the unemployed’.

  CHERRY and SALIM look up at the house. The FOUR JAMAICANS stand behind them, at a respectful distance.

  CHERRY: I don’t even remember buying this house at the auction. What are we going to do with it?

  SALIM: Tomorrow we start to renovate it.

  CHERRY: How many people are living here?

  SALIM: There are no people living here. There are only squatters. And they’re going to be renovated – right now.

  (And SALIM pushes CHERRY forward, giving her the key. CHERRY goes to the front door of the house. SALIM, with TWO JAMAICANS goes round the side of the house. TWO JAMAICANS go round the other side.)

  INT. A ROOM IN THE SQUAT. DAY

  GENGHIS and JOHNNY are living in a room in the squat. It is freezing cold, with broken windows. GENGHIS is asleep on a mattress, wrapped up. He has the flu. JOHNNY is lying frozen in a deck chair, with blankets over him. He has just woken up.

  EXT. OUTSIDE THE HOUSE. DAY

  CHERRY tries to unlock the front door of the place. But the door has been barred. She looks in through the letter box. A barricade has been erected in the hall.

  EXT. THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE. DAY

  The JAMAICANS break into the house through side windows. They climb in. SALIM also climbs into the house.

  INT. INSIDE THE HOUSE. DAY

  The JAMAICANS and SALIM are in the house now.

  The JAMAICANS are kicking open the doors of the squatted rooms. The SQUATTERS are unprepared, asleep or half-awake, in disarray.

  The JAMAICANS are going from room to room, yelling for everyone to leave now or get thrown out of the windows with their belongings.

  Some SQUATTERS complain but they are shoved out of their rooms into the hall; or down the stairs. SALIM is eager about all of this.

  INT. GENGHIS AND JOHNNY’S ROOM. DAY

  JOHNNY looks up the corridor to see what’s happening. He goes back into the room quickly and starts stuffing his things into a black plastic bag. He is shaking GENGHIS at the same time.

  GENGHIS: I’m ill.

  JOHNNY: We’re moving house.

  GENGHIS: No, we’ve got to fight.

  JOHNNY: Too early in the morning.

  (He rips the blankets off GENGHIS, who lies there fully dressed, coughing and shivering. A JAMAICAN bursts into the room.)

  All right, all right.

  (The JAMAICAN watches a moment as GENGHIS, too weak to resist, but cursing violently, takes the clothes JOHNNY shoves at him and follows JOHNNY to the window. JOHNNY opens the broken window.)

  EXT. OUTSIDE THE HOUSE. DAY

  A wide shot of the house.

  The SQUATTERS are leaving through windows and the re-opened front door and gathering in the front garden, arranging their wretched belongings. Some of them are junkies. They look dishevelled and disheartened.

  From an upper room in the house come crashing a guitar, a TV and some records. This is followed by the enquiring head of a JAMAICAN, looking to see these have hit no one.

  One SQUATTER, in the front garden, is resisting and a JAMAICAN is holding him. The SQUATTER screams at CHERRY: you pig, you scum, you filthy rich shit, etc.

  As SALIM goes to join CHERRY, she goes to the screaming SQUATTER and gives him a hard backhander across the face.

  EXT. THE BACK OF THE HOUSE. DAY

  JOHNNY and GENGHIS stumble down through the back garden of the house and over the wall at the end, JOHNNY pulling and helping the exhausted GENGHIS.

  At no time do they see CHERRY or SALIM.

  INT. BATHROOM. DAY

  OMAR has been soaking Papa’s clothes in the bath. He pulls them dripping from the bath and puts them in an old steel bucket, wringing them out. He picks up the bucket.

  EXT. BALCONY. DAY

  OMAR is hanging out Papa’s dripping pjyamas on the washing line on the balcony, pulling them out of the bucket.

  The balcony overlooks several busy railway lines, commuter routes into Charing Cross and London Bridge, from the suburbs.

  OMAR turns and looks through the glass of the balcony door into the main room of the flat. PAPA is lying in bed. He pours himself some vodka. Water from the pyjamas drips down Omar’s trousers and into his shoes.

  When he turns away, a train, huge, close, fast, crashes towards the camera and bangs and rattles its way past, a few feet from the exposed overhanging balcony. OMAR is unperturbed.

  INT. PAPA’S ROOM. DAY

  The flat OMAR and his father, PAPA, share in South London. It’s a small, damp and dirty place which hasn’t been decorated for years.

  PAPA is as thin as a medieval Christ: an unkempt alcoholic. His hair is long; his toenails uncut; he is unshaven and scratches his arse shamelessly. Yet he is not without dignity.

  His bed is in the living room. PAPA never leaves the bed and watches TV most of the time.

  By the bed is a photograph of Papa’s dead wife, Mary. And on the bed is an address book and the telephone.

  PAPA empties the last of a bottle of vodka into a filthy glass. He rolls the empty bottle under the bed.

  OMAR is now pushing an old-fashioned and ineffective carpet sweeper across the floor. PAPA looks at OMAR’s face. He indicates that OMAR should move his face closer, which OMAR reluctantly does. To amuse himself, PAPA squashes OMAR’s nose and pulls his cheeks, shaking the boy’s unamused face from side to side.

  PAPA: I’m fixing you with a job. With your uncle. Work now, till you go back to college. If your face gets any longer here you’ll overbalance. Or I’ll commit suicide.

  INT. KITCHEN. DAY

  OMAR is in the kitchen of the flat, stirring a big saucepan of dall. He can see through the open door his FATHER speaking on the phone to NASSER. PAPA speaks in Urdu. ‘How are you?’ he says. ‘And Bilquis? And Tania and the other girls?’

  PAPA: (Into phone) Can’t you give Omar some work in your garage for a few weeks, yaar? The bugger’s your nephew after all.

  NASSER: (VO on phone) Why do you want to punish me?

  INT. PAPA’S ROOM. DAY

  PAPA is speaking to NASSER on the phone. He watches OMAR slowly stirring dall in the kitchen. OMAR is, of course, listening.

  PAPA: He’s on dole like everyone else in England. What’s he doing home? Just roaming and moaning. />
  NASSER: (VO on phone) Haven’t you trained him up to look after you, like I have with my girls?

  PAPA: He brushes the dust from one place to another. He squeezes shirts and heats soup. But that hardly stretches him. Though his food stretches me. It’s only for a few months, yaar. I’ll send him to college in the autumn.

  NASSER: (VO) He failed once. He had this chronic laziness that runs in our family except for me.

  PAPA: If his arse gets lazy – kick it. I’ll send a certificate giving permission. And one thing more. Try and fix him with a nice girl. I’m not sure if his penis is in full working order.

  INT. FLAT. DAY

  Later. OMAR puts a full bottle of vodka on the table next to Papa’s bed.

  PAPA: Go to your uncle’s garage.

  (And PAPA pours himself a vodka. OMAR quickly thrusts a bottle of tomato juice towards PAPA, which PAPA ignores. Before PAPA can take a swig of the straight vodka, OMAR grabs the glass and adds tomato juice. PAPA takes it.)

  If Nasser wants to kick you – let him. I’ve given permission in two languages. (To the photograph.) The bloody’s doing me a lot of good. Eh, bloody Mary?

  EXT. STREET. DAY

  OMAR walks along a South London street, towards NASSER’s garage. It’s a rough area, beautiful in its own falling-down way.

  A youngish white BUSKER is lying stoned in the doorway of a boarded-up shop, his guitar next to him. OMAR looks at him.

  Walking towards OMAR from an amusement arcade across the street are JOHNNY and GENGHIS and MOOSE. GENGHIS is a well-built white man carrying a pile of right-wing newspapers, badges etc. MOOSE is a big white man, GENGHIS’s lieutenant.