Barriers to Diversity in Film – A Research Review – Aug 07

the ways these film types have developed as representing progress.
Films such as My Beautiful Launderette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie
get laid (1987) offer a plural and hybrid identity for audiences and are
seen to be more representative of Britain than hitherto (Hill 2006).
However, there are fewer current films which offer a portrayal of
everyday life and hybridity in Britain. It has also been argued, however,
that the most significant films directed and written by women in the
1990s are Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji
on the Beach (1993) which contest traditional British heritage film. In
Orlando, English heritage (the Elizabethan Age, the country house, the
Empire, Queen Victoria) is depicted in a way that renders it strange.
This interrogation of heritage film re-stages English heritage as a
drama of gendered performance, in which Orlando, crossing sexes,
loses his property but greets the future having produced a daughter
and a novel (Brunsdon 2000).
Another strand of British heritage is addressed in Bhaji on the Beach,
namely the Ealing comedies for which Britain is famous. The
‘Ealingness’ of an Asian women’s trip to Blackpool (where, as in other
Ealing comedies, different individuals come to slightly different
understandings of their situation) shows the multiplicity of female
Asian identities and explores female destiny and identity in a hybrid
post-colonial Britain. This latter point is embodied in “one of the film’s
finest moments, through the Punjabi rendering of the Cliff Richard
1960s hit ‘Summer Holiday’, as the day trippers set off”. Other films
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