My Beautiful Laundrette - Enzian Theater

40^th Anniversary Screening!

Celebrating 40-years of Enzian Theater, each month we will highlight a classic film from 1985 to illustrate the lasting impact of the films of the era and the legacy of Central Florida’s only non-profit arthouse movie theater. Thank you for being part of our 4-decade contribution to arts culture in Orlando.

Enzian Film Club: Summer School Edition
Summer school is in session! Our Enzian Film Club professors are on a well-deserved vacation, but you’ve still got a lot to learn. Join us June–August for screenings and talkbacks with Enzian programmers and community guests, and keep your brain (or at least your social skills) sharp until our return to class in September. It might not be Driver’s Ed, but it’s better than independent study.

Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen) was at the forefront of the British cinematic revival of the mid-1980s, and the delightfully transgressive My Beautiful Laundrette is his greatest triumph of the period. Working from an Oscar®-nominated script by Hanif Kureishi, who was soon to be an internationally renowned writer, Frears tells an uncommon love story that takes place between a young South London Pakistani man (Gordon Warnecke), who decides to open an upscale laundromat to make his family proud, and his childhood friend, a street punk (3-time Academy® Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis, in his breakthrough role) who volunteers to help make his dream a reality. This culture-clash comedy is also a subversive work of social realism that dares to address racism, homophobia, and sociopolitical marginalization in Margaret Thatcher’s England.

1985, 98 minutes, UK, Directed by Stephen Frears, Rated R

Thank you to our 40th Anniversary sponsors!

“My Beautiful Laundrette is still fresh and remains a model case for creating moving, liberating cinema from an oppressive environment. It’s every bit the landmark gay film it deserves to be.”
– Eric Henderson, SLANT MAGAZINE
“Frears uses the story of one relationship, intimate but exploitive, to mirror England's racial strife. By turns tender and angry, it's a film of distinctive, commanding voice.”
– Bill Cosford, MIAMI HERALD
“The movie has elements of a coming-of-age saga, a gay romance, a drug-smuggling thriller, and a redemption tale, but it works first and foremost as a portrait of a milieu that had previously been all but invisible onscreen, and that remains so to this day.”
– Mike D’Angelo, THE A.V. CLUB
“Fast, bold, harsh and primitive, like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat.”
– Richard Corliss, TIME