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Author, playwright, and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi navigates freely between the written genre and the filmed genre, from screenplay to film or novel to television, finding his written works often translated to the big screen (My Beautiful Laundrette [Frears, 1985], Sammy and Rosie Get Laid [Frears, 1987], My Son the Fanatic [Prasad, 1997]) or turned into television adaptations (The Buddha of Suburbia [BBC, 1993]). His writing, especially in novel or short story form, has a visual quality that transcends the separation between the written word and the filmed frame. In fact Kureishi's narratives tend to float seamlessly in a postmodern, postcolonial aesthetic, mixing a linguistic and visual cocktail that includes humor and seriousness, references to high culture and lowbrow culture, with a dash of raw sex, poured into characters, who, "intoxicated and frustrated" at the same time, possess a common trait: they are always attempting to live life "this intensely" (The Buddha of Suburbia 15).
The most confounding moments in Kureishi's films, plays, novels, and novellas are probably the most intimate ones-when a couple is communicating through touch, from the gentle kiss to a more erotic embrace. Furthermore, this intimate contact often takes place in typically impersonal environments-harsh, cold, gray London neighborhoods that do not normally appear on tourist maps. Kureishi's London is his London, or rather the South London neighborhoods where he grew up, on the edges. In Patrice Chéreau's loosely based film adaptation of the novella Intimacy (2001), a man and a woman share very intense physical moments that make their "Wednesday" encounters verge on the edge of soft porn. But what makes these intimate encounters so compelling is that they take place in the man's disheveled apartment, "somewhere" in London, on one of those gray days that hover over many northern European cities any time of the year. Marked by a tube station, gray brick row houses, wide open streets where cars occasionally drive by, bus shelters, and a lone unremarkable pub, the London of Kureishi, both austere and familiar, indexes a bland urban backdrop. From this melancholy, almost two-dimensional theatrical backdrop-an aesthetic specific to someone who also works in the theater-the inhabitants emerge, giving the city its "corpo/reality."
Discussing his collaboration with French director Patrice Chéreau on the film Intimacy, Kureishi comments: