The Paris Review and Roxy Cinema are pleased to present a screening of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), directed by Stephen Frears and written by Hanif Kureishi. The novelist Hari Kunzru will give an introduction. Purchase tickets here.

Forty years after the film’s release, Kureishi’s script, defined by its moral daring and roguish humor, remains a masterclass in subversive screenwriting. “My Beautiful Laundrette was the first time everything had come together in my writing,” Kureishi tells Kunzru in an interview published in the recent Winter issue of the Review. In the film, set in Thatcherite London, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), an ambitious young Pakistani man, recruits Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), a childhood friend who has become a skinhead, to comanage a laundrette; amid the suds and political and familial dramas, the pair become lovers. “I saw it as a sort of gay comedy taking the piss out of entrepreneurship,” Kureishi says. “You want to be a Thatcherite? These gay boys are going to open a launderette on your street and it’ll be really successful!”

 

Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, most recently Blue Ruin. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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