AllMovie

Director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan team to adapt author Monica Ali's award-winning novel about a young girl from Bangladesh who finds the spark in her soul slowly fading after traveling to London for an arranged marriage. As a child, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) was always told that she was a survivor. Now, as a young adult, she must contend with the sudden death of her mother. Her father arranges her marriage to a man she has never met, and she gets shuttled off from her quaint village to a working-class neighborhood in East London, as the bride of Chanu (Satish Kaushik), where she earns extra income via sewing. At first, the newlywed Nazneen does her best to be a devoted wife and loving mother. It's a lonely life, and as the pompous ineffectual Chanu does his best to fit into British society, the bored housewife finds herself increasingly drawn to Karim (Christopher Simpson), the hotheaded fellow who delivers pants to her door for various sewing jobs. The two lapse into an impassioned affair, but Chanu grows increasingly determined to marry Nazreen himself, especially as his own politics become more and more radical in the wake of 9/11.