At the start of Brick Lane we briefly meet Nazneen as a teenager, playing innocently in the rice fields of Bangladesh with her sister Hasina on the day her mother commits suicide. She is soon told that she is to be sent away to marry a man in London who has an education.

We meet Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) again, seventeen years later as she walks down the ‘brick lane’ of the title and enters the small but homely flat she maintains for her husband and two daughters, fourteen-year-old Shahana and Bibi who is ten. In these opening stages the director, Sarah Gavron, makes pains to compare the bleakness of London and the now taciturn Nazneen, to the vibrant colours and blue skies of Bangladesh.

Her husband Chanu (Satish Kauhisk) is immediatly painted as a type of ogreous and domineering fat bastard that you wince about when you contemplate an arranged marriage. He’s much older than Nazneen, cumbersomely overweight, and portrayed as a man who garners very little respect from the outside world but behaves as though the world cannot do without him.

Chanu quits his job when he’s passed over for promotion and goes into debt to buy a computer. This is the last straw for Nazneen, who had been promised that with money from the promotion she would be able to visit Bangladesh to see her sister. She decides to take on work as a seemstress, earning money for herself and finally taking a step in the direction of becoming her own person. She finally lets people enter her life, beginning a friendly relationship with a neighbor, and a flirtation with Karim (Christopher Simpson), the delivery boy who collects her clothes.

The story follows a somewhat well-worn path of self-discovery, and the idea that perhaps the vivid colours of Bangladesh are merely a filtered remembrance of a happier time. Perhaps Hasina’s letters to Nazneen which she waits longingly for and fawns over when they arrive, aren’t telling her the full truth either. But despite fine performances from the key cast it all seems a little bit contrived and inevitable.

These type of ‘cultural melting-pot’ films are almost de rigueur right now, with government funding agencies keen to develop scripts that have cross-racial/ethnic/religious themes, and if you can make it relevant in a ‘post 9/11’ kind of way then you’re all set. But this can be to the detriment of promoting films that are entertaining first and message driven second. We’re a pretty clever audience, throw us a metaphor.

Brick Lane rates 3 stars.