Journey towards independence

MONICA Ali's novel Brick Lane was an unvarnished portrait of life among members of London's Bangladeshi community

Tannishtha Chatterjee in Brick Lane

Brick Lane (M) 3½ stars Limited national release The Dinner Guest (L'Invite) (PG) 1½ stars Limited national release Drillbit Taylor (PG) 2 stars National release MONICA Ali's novel Brick Lane was an unvarnished portrait of life among members of London's Bangladeshi community, especially those who live in that run-down part of the East End from which the author derived her title.

In adapting the book for the screen, Australian writer Laura Jones (collaborating with Abi Morgan) has been obliged to strip a good deal from the original. The screenplay picks up the story about halfway through the book, resorting to flashbacks to flesh out the material. But Jones has given director Sarah Gavron a solidly dramatic piece on which to base her affectionate portrait of the emancipation of a Muslim woman.

After her mother's unexplained suicide, 16-year-old Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is forced to leave the village in which she grew up with her sister and enter into an arranged marriage with a man she has never met. This is Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who takes her to London where they live in a grim little flat in Brick Lane and where Nazneen rears two daughters who, by 2001, are teenagers, almost as old as she was when she left her home.

In a relatively brief running time, the film covers a lot of ground, including the effect on the community of the events in New York on September 11 that year. But the heart of this affecting story is the sexual relationship that develops between Nazneen and Karim (Christopher Simpson), a younger man who provides her with work as a seamstress, and the way this affects her relationship with her decent but numbingly traditional husband.

There are various subplots, such as Nazneen's horrified realisation that her sister, who has never left Bangladesh, is surviving only because she has become a prostitute, and marginal characters, including a grasping money-lender (Lalita Ahmed), but it's Nazneen's journey towards independence that is the centre of the film.

As she copes with her increasingly demanding and independent-minded daughters, or attends a meeting of Muslim Action, or watches David Lean's Brief Encounter on television, Nazneen is a conflicted woman who can't forget the seemingly idyllic life back home that had been so rudely interrupted 17 years before, and Chatterjee's fine performance brings this troubled character vividly to life.

Unexpectedly, though, the most powerful performance in the film comes from Kaushik as the overweight, naive, stubborn, demanding yet strangely likable husband. He could easily have been the villain of the piece but he, too, gains strength as the film progresses and his journey turns out to be as interesting and strangely rewarding as that of his wife.

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THE Dinner Guest (L'Invite) is the latest, and least, in a seemingly endless line of French stage comedies brought to the screen. In this variation on a familiar theme (get some ill-matched characters together around a dinner table), Daniel Auteuil plays Gerard, a plastic-film wrapper who has been unemployed for three years. He's delighted to be offered a job in Indonesia, but there's a hitch: he and his dim-witted wife, Colette (Valerie Lemercier), have to entertain his prospective new boss, Potignac (Hippolyte Girardot), at dinner for a get-to-know-you session. Neither Gerard, who is obsessed with a model train set that operates all over their apartment, nor Colette possess much in the way of social graces, but they're persuaded by their relentlessly friendly neighbour, Alexandre (Thierry Lhermitte), a self-described PR expert, to let him help them.

The comedy that ensues, which is as obvious as the film's stage origins, revolves around the slim notion that the smugly self-assured Alexandre is wrong in just about every respect. Luckily, the actors are supremely professional (though Auteuil's hang-dog air becomes a bit wearying and women in the audience may become irritated by Lemercier's portrayal of Colette as a brainless doormat) and they make all this mildly enjoyable until the jaw-droppingly unsatisfactory ending.

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DRILLBIT Taylor, the latest from the Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen school of comedy, benefits enormously from the presence of Owen Wilson in the title role. Drillbit is an unemployed petty thief who hangs out with his peers and camps out near the beach. At least he takes care of his personal hygiene because he showers (naked) on the beach every morning. This engaging misfit is hired by a trio of nerdy teenagers, skinny Wade (Nate Hartley), plump Ryan (Troy Gentile) and diminutive Emmit (David Dorfman), to protect them from the bullies who are making their lives hell in their first term at high school.

The chief bully is played by Alex Frost (first seen in Gus Van Sant's Elephant) and with his combination of menace and charm -- he surely has a future as a movie villain -- he's particularly effective in the role. However, much of the film just coasts along in the most predictable fashion.

Wilson, throwing away one-liners with cheerful abandon, seems sublimely oblivious to the paucity of the material. He makes this hackneyed film almost worthwhile.