Brick Lane (Britain 2007, 102 min, dir: Sarah Gavron, cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sastish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson)

Someone once confided to me that the real tragedy of being an immigrant to another culture is that your kids will never know who you are. They’ll be English, or French, or Dutch, or American and you’ll be a stranger from another place who carries a life of memories and joys that your family has no patience to understand. The older you get the less comfort and the more loneliness. Brick Road is not about an old person.

It is about a Bangladeshi girl whose world is suddenly changed by the death of her mother. She is forced into an arranged marriage with an old man and sent to the Bangladeshi community around Brick Lane, in East London, to be his bride. The years give her two children but never improve the loveless marriage. Then a young man, around her age, comes into her life and, for the first time, she feels love.

The affair abruptly comes up against history. 9/11 puts all British Moslems under suspicion. Her lover says it is time to forsake this shadow life under the thumb of the British and go back to Bangladesh. It is what she has yearned for all her life: the chance to pick up the life she was torn away from as a teenage bride. Now she can return with a man she passionately loves. But where does she belong? Is she Bangladeshi or British? Where is her country?

Her decision is the heart of the film, and what makes it so much a story of unrequited hopes and dreams that finally yield to new understanding. There are many pilgrim stories in movies. They’ve played against backgrounds as varied as the American West and the plains of Africa. The paving stones of Brick Lane are yet another landscape for a story that is personal, heartfelt, and universal.