Brick Lane’s queen strikes gold

Brick Lane’s queen strikes gold on the silver screen

Matthew d'Ancona

17 October 2007

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An interview with Monica Ali

The tidal wave was a debut novel of stunning confidence and elegance called Brick Lane and, four years on, I am sitting in a Dulwich bistro with its author, Monica Ali, to discuss the film of the book, which is about to be released. Directed by Sarah Gavron, the movie is a jewel in its own right: a variation on a theme, rather than a straightforward translation of text to screen. But it is true to the delicacy of the original, the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who is brought to the East End by an arranged marriage, and finds illicit love in the arms of a young radical, Karim. The performance of Tannishtha Chatterjee, a prominent Indian arthouse actor, as Nazneen is particularly luminous.

Ali, who turns 40 this Saturday, made a conscious decision not to intervene in the making of the movie. ‘I thought I either have to be fully involved and try to write the screenplay myself, or I have to step away. I would have wanted to meddle if I had been involved at all, that wasn’t the right way to go. I had a feeling that if it was going to work as a film — which it probably wouldn’t because most films of a book generally don’t — then it has to be somebody else’s vision again, and somebody else’s work of art that they want to give birth to again, not just me trying to keep it true to the book. But she has, Sarah has actually kept quite true to the book.’

Fine-featured and thoughtful, her sentences punctuated by an appealingly raucous laugh, Ali wears her success and her intellect lightly. So it is hard to reconcile this instantly likeable person, sipping at her cappuccino, with the figure at the centre of the controversy around the film.

For reasons that remain opaque, a group of self-appointed Brick Lane ‘community leaders’ took against the movie, claiming that it was a ‘despicable insult’ to the neighbourhood, that the novelist was ‘not one of us’ and even that young people might ‘blockade the area’. In fact, the protests against the movie have been very small in scale, and other Bengali residents have expressed frustration that their views about Brick Lane should be misrepresented as homogeneously hostile.

Too late: the film company was unable to shoot on location and, shamefully, the Prince of Wales cancelled the Royal Film Performance of the movie, which was due to take place on 29 October (it will now receive its première three days earlier at the London Film Festival). Clarence House cited diary clashes, but conceded that the ‘appropriateness of the film chosen’ was also a factor. How little it now takes to scare a Prince off supporting an artistic enterprise.