★★★☆☆
The second collaboration between the director Stephen Frears and the writer Hanif Kureishi isn’t an unalloyed triumph like their previous one, My Beautiful Laundrette, or Kureishi’s later novel and TV series, The Buddha of Suburbia. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, another tale of an interracial relationship, is as messy, jarring and disorientating as the Eighties London in which it’s set. Thirty years on, though, it’s also a seamy snapshot of a time when bohemian lefties embraced the lower classes and multiculturalism as if they were new albums by Talk Talk.
Ayub Khan-Din and Frances Barber play the middle-class couple of the title, venturing from their comfortable home to the riot-torn streets beyond. She is writing a book on the social and political history of kissing, and the pair’s social exploration often amounts to copping off with the proles. Sammy and Rosie’s open relationship reaches its much-derided climax, so to speak, when they both get laid at the same time, with other people, and the screen splits to show writhing couples.
It’s a silly gimmick from Frears, but the performances are much better, and varied support comes from a young Meera Syal; Shashi Kapoor, as Sammy’s baffled father, visiting from the sub-continent; and Roland Gift, a super-smooth singer with the pop-funk outfit Fine Young Cannibals.
18, 101min
Screened with a Q&A with actors Roland Gift and Claire Bloom, BFI Southbank, London SE1, July 25