Brick Lane

This dramatisation of the bestseller first novel by Monica Ali is far more successful than many adaptations. It keeps pretty closely to the storyline of the book and gets under the skin of the central characters. The film tells the tale of a bride of 17 brought to East London to marry a man she has never met, with whom she has little in common, and finds that the London she has come to is hardly a better life than the one she left in Bangladesh. The flashbacks to her childhood are always bright and colourful - she is laughing and smiling with her sister - the scenes in London are gloomy in comparison. The sense of isolation is tangible. The film concentrates on the period leading up to the events on 9/11, and the child bride, now 16 years into her marriage gradually comes to discover the possibility of a different kind of life with Karim, the westernised British born Bengali who supplies her with the clothes for her to sew, in a vain attempt to supplement the meagre family income. Her husband, is naturally pretty useless in most ways. Despite his claims to the contrary his life is a failure, and he possesses Micawber like confidence that 'something will come up'. In many ways this is a moving, thought provoking tale, with much to say about human relationships - and tentatively examines the confusion within an immigrant community under pressure - and how those tensions resolve themselves in different ways. Rating: 7/10