ON CIRCUIT: Awake, Bricklane, The Forbidden Kingdom and the new Cameron Diaz film, What Happens in Vegas.
Awake
Hayden Christensen and Jessica Alba (I know, sounds bad enough, right?) star in this most dreary of thrillers about a man who wakes up during his heart-transplant surgery but is unable to move or stop the procedure. Obviously there’s more going on but we don’t want to reveal any ‘plot twists” to those who might see the film and not see them coming. Suffice it to say, the film is a completely unsurprising and morbid affair. — Warren Foster
Brick Lane
Sarah Gavron’s feature version of Monica Ali’s novel represents a modest slimming down of the original’s dimensions; what emerges could almost be described as a chamber piece, set in one cramped east London flat. Perhaps venturing out into the real Brick Lane would have been impolitic — considering the unedifying row that surrounded its filming — and some might argue that there is a sense of withdrawal or retreat in the movie as a whole.
But I enjoyed the quiet intelligence of Tannishtha Chatterjee, playing Nazneen, a young woman from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, who finds herself married off to Chanu (Satish Kaushik) and forced to bring up a family under London’s grim skies. Her spirits are in a slow decline until she has an affair with handsome young Karim (Christopher Simpson), who is radicalised after 9/11.
What is interesting about this perspective on militant Islam is that a resurgence of Bangladeshi national identity has become a complex business. As Chanu points out, Bangladesh is an Islamic state that was born out of a war that set Muslim against Muslim. And an Islamic revival would appear to place Nazneen in even more of a subordinate position than she is now. Gavron’s movie finds an unfashionably gentle, human optimism in the face of all this and a sympathetic performance from Chatterjee makes it plausible. — Peter Bradshaw