Rue Britannia My Beautiful Laundrette

By RICHARD CORLISS

Britain's love affair with the Indian subcontinent, in books, films and mini- series, is a quaint disease, a melancholy for everything exotic the empire has owned and lost. To a romantic imperialist brooding over his sherry, the decorous Indians, with their subversive good manners, impressive intellectual tradition and caste system as rigid as their overlords', seemed perfect Asian ambassadors for all things English. The years have lent Indians and Pakistanis of old an ironic nobility; about them a Brit can feel at once guilty and nostalgic. Unless, of course, one has to deal with their sons and daughters on the streets of London. Now the Indo-Paks' manner is seen as rude and abrupt, their intellectual energy devoted to turning a quick quid, and in areas like South London there is a new caste system, with the immigrants running things and the working-class white "natives" in their employ. The Pakistanis and , the punks are inverting colonialism and reinventing capitalism. The empire has come home, and on both sides, proximity breeds contempt.

Or passion. Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis) is a bleach-blond tough with a National Front past. His boyhood pal Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is the son of an impoverished Pakistani writer (Roshan Seth) and the nephew of a gaudy entrepreneur (Saeed Jaffrey). Uncle is a sharp businessman but unlucky with women: his daughter is a rebellious flirt, his aging mistress carries herself like the ghost of swinging London, and his wife hexes the mistress with an evil spell concocted of mice and berries. When Uncle puts Omar in charge of a run-down Laundromat -- laundrette, in Britspeak -- the lad nicks a couple of packets of cocaine to finance a renovation; he calls the place Powders. Omar hires Johnny as his assistant, and the two fall into a tense, delicate master- slave tryst. In commerce and pleasure, Omar is a fast learner. How could he not be, with Uncle to teach him? "I'm a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani," Uncle shrugs as he evicts a poet from his squat. "And there's no such thing as race in the new enterprise culture."

For the new Anglo-India, a new kind of movie: fast, bold, harsh and primitive, like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat. My Beautiful Laundrette has no echo of eulogy in its street wit, no time for nuances of character in its rush to spray-paint a teeming social fresco. Hanif Kureishi, 29, the film's author, says he originally planned a three- or four- hour work with a Godfather sprawl, but settled for 93 minutes and (pounds) 600,000 from Britain's Channel 4. The pinch shows, and so does the pluck. Kureishi's story shifts moods, and Omar changes motivations (Candide to Sammy Glick), in an eyewink. Stephen Frears' direction can be lyrical and clumsy by turns; it can soar or trip over its headlong ambitiousness. The splendid cast is urged toward caricature, then plays through it, with Seth magnificent as a mandarin socialist in decay. He is the eloquent conscience of a people stranded in a land whose imperial sun has set. Alas, they are too busy making it, on the empire's old terms, to listen to him. -- R.C.