The film stars Gordon Warnecke as a young man of Pakistani descent living in London during the Margaret Thatcher era. His takes care of his father, who was once a successful journalist (Roshan Seth), but has since turned to alcoholism out of despair for the direction England is heading. Warnecke goes to his uncle (Saaed Jaffrey), who is more active in the London Pakistani community, for a job, and ends up tasked with taking over a failing laundromat (laundrette) and trying to make something of it.
Meanwhile, Warnecke is reunited with an old school friend, Daniel Day Lewis, when a group of punks attack him and some of his family members. Warnecke recognizes Lewis among them and offers him a job helping out with the renovations of the laundrette to try to get him out of his shitty circumstances. We also get some clues that the two used to have a romantic relationship back when they were in school together, and that it might start back up again.
This is the second movie in a row for Romancefest where so much of the wealth of the movie comes from the specificity of who the characters are and the environment they live in. If you stripped all of this away, you might still have an interesting story, but it would not be as rich. The layers on top of the simple romance and simple task of running a business are what makes the movie memorable, funny and dramatic. Here you've got a Pakistani man in a homosexual relationship with a British guy, trying to run a business during difficult times for the economy and for the left-wing in general. We don't need any manufactured drama when we've got this kind of stuff going on and that goes a long way towards making the film that much more authentic, and that goes a long way towards making us sympathetic to the central relationship.
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