Gavron’s picnic in Brick Lane retells Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi family, outwardly happy but inwardly troubled in London’s East End.
After twenty years, Nazneen’s arranged marriage to Chanu Ahmed is wobbly. The picnic is supposed to be a lark, but it’s a kind of torture for Nanzeen. About sixty, paunchy and jobless, Chanu decides that he wants to see the city as a tourist after twenty years of living in London. They pack a cooler, head for Buckingham Palace, and picnic in St. James’s Park.
When Nanzeen poses for picnic photographs, her husband Chanu asks her to smile more, not realizing that her face betrays her inner anxiety. She’s never loved Chanu, but at the time of the picnic, now has a lover Karim, a Muslim political activist, whose notion of romantic love is to tell her to take off her clothes and get into bed.
Ironically, when the negatives are eventually developed, the results are blurred, “like when a monsoon washed away the shape of things.” (The camera never lies? Maybe.)
Having done the cooking and all of the preparation, Nazneen now sets out the food—a mix of traditional Bangladeshi and British: chicken wings with yogurt, hard-boiled eggs glazed in curry, fried onions breaded with chilies, chickpeas, tomatoes with cumin and ginger, chapatis—and Dairy Lea Triangle Crisps. Chanu loads his plate, “Quite a spread,” he said in English. “You know, when I married your mother, it was a stroke of luck.”
After eating, Chanu falls asleep; the children wander, and Nazneen thinks of her lover.
The cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen Ahmed; Satish Kaushik as Chanu Ahmed; Lana Rahman as Bibi Ahmed; Naeema Begum as Shahna Ahmed.
See Sarah Gavron. Brick Alley (2007). Screenplay by Laura Jones and Abi Morgan based on Monica Ali’s novel; Monica Ali. Brick Alley. New York: Scribner, 2003