Podcast for Social Research, Episode 79.5: My Beautiful Laundrette — a Brief Film Guide

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte and Isi Litke discuss Stephen Frears’s 1985 classic of queer cinema, My Beautiful Laundrette. Conversation ranges over the film’s Thatcherite backdrop; its depiction of queer, and cross-racial, love; and its inimitable mix of gritty social realism and dreamlike sensuality. What’s unique, in the queer cinematic canon, about a film made just before the AIDS crisis emerged in British public consciousness—that is, just prior to the inceasing identification of queerness with disease? How does the film, with its “qualified utopian hope,” contrast with later, more pessimistic classics of the New Queer Cinema? Why, in a film set in a laundromat, is it a source of hope that some things don’t stay clean?

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