I know I’m really late with this, but I need to vent NOW. Corporate is hideously bad. It’s tacky, moralistic, badly written, badly made, and I can’t find a single good thing to say about it. I thought Page 3 was a refreshing kind of film, well scripted and reasonably well done (great performances by Konkona Sensharma, Sandhya Mridul, Boman Irani), despite the moralising about the other kinky habits of P3Ps - they drink! they smoke! gasp - they sleep around! (more…)
Germaine Greer,Natasha Walter, writing on these pages, claims not to know what I could possibly mean by saying that the residents of Brick Lane have a “moral right” to refuse to cooperate with the people making the film of Monica Ali’s book. Perhaps Walter doesn’t understand how disturbing it is to have gobbets of your life sampled, digested and dished back up to you in unrecognisable form. You don’t have the moral right to stop the process, but you must have a moral right to refuse to cooperate in your own misrepresentation. If you grant an interview, you don’t have the right to censor what the interviewer makes of you; the only right you have is to refuse to grant the interview in the first place. VS Naipaul has no way of preventing the dissemination of Paul Theroux’s only too credible hatchet job on him, but he does have the right to turn Theroux away from his door…
Why did Monica Ali’s book have to be called Brick Lane?… A writer who hangs the carcass of her invention around the necks of real people cannot expect them to rejoice in a burden that they can now never relinquish. The text will outlast them, realer than life. Generations still unborn will think they know what life was like in the London Sylheti community at the turn of the 21st century - unless a better writer comes along and does a better job, which will be even less forgivable. Writers have a charmed life, rewarded, lionised, premiated and protected against the consequences of their own indiscretion. If reality occasionally bites back, it is no more than they deserve.
