Brick Lane is the name of a famous street market in East London. It's also the title of a highly successful but still literary novel by English-Bangladeshi author Monica Ali. Along with Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, Brick Lane was a landmark piece of work which gave voice to a new multicultural sensibility in Britain. The themes of the tension between the first and second generation immigrants are brilliantly played out in this long-awaited film adaptation.

Author Monica Ali has adapted her own work for the screen with Australian-born writer Laura Jones (Oscar and Lucinda, Angela's Ashes). The pair have realised a rich, busy family backdrop against which the central troubled love story is played out. The beautiful Nazneen (nice work from newcomer Tannishtha Chatterjee) is sent to London to marry the family-chosen husband Chanu (a perfectly cast Satish Kaushik). Immigrant life on the rundown council estate is confined and hard, especially as the ineffectual Chanu is unable to understand the endless racist knock-backs thrown his way, and the semi-poverty that confers on Nazneen and their two Anglicised daughters. Against advice, Nazneen takes home sweat-shop work, which brings her into contact with a handsome, younger British-born Bangladeshi, Karim (Christopher Simpson), which complicates things fatally.

The story here is seen solely from within the immigrant experience, but it is so well told and emotionally true that we never resent this confinement. The family is completely convincing, and the film happily doesn't stray anywhere near being an ersatz Kumars at No 42 ethnic parody. In many ways, the love story is a familiar one, but the emotional truth of the playing keeps the film grounded but universal, and deeply affecting to boot.