Film

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)

Director: Stephen Frears

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A genial, retired Indian political torturer (Kapoor) returns to England to visit son Sammy (Dim) and daughter-in-law Rosie (Barber) in war-torn Ladbroke Grove. Family explanations are conducted in the thick of riots, the first of many preposterous juxtapositions. Sammy accommodates his father because he wants his money; social worker (yawn) Rosie is less of a pushover, wanting political commitment and sexual freedom, ie. to have her cock and eat it. So does this film, tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark. Black Danny (Gift) smiles enigmatically in a woman's hat ('Call me Victoria'), symbolising some seraphic quality or other; hectoring lesbians swap het-hating slogans; a peace commune beneath the Westway is bulldozed to the strains of patriotic music; and in one of the worst sequences in this oratorio of half-baked agitprop, the screen splits into three layers to show six people fucking at once, serenaded by close-harmony Rastas. Finally, in a last-ditch attempt at dramatic structure, the retired torturer, hounded by the grotty ghost of one of his victims, strings himself up. My Beautiful Laundrette it is not.

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