When Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) recalls her carefree childhood -- the time before her mother waded into a river and purposefully slipped beneath the water to her death -- she thinks of herself in motion.

Running, chasing, bounding through the gloriously green paddy fields in Bangladesh with her younger sister. In real and imagined memories, she's unfettered, free, smiling.

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'Brick Lane'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson
• Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality and brief strong language. Almost entirely in English but with some subtitles for Bengali dialogue.

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But in East London, where the adult Nazneen lives with her older husband (theirs was an arranged marriage) and their daughters ages 14 and 10, she is a captive of hard surfaces and even harder choices in "Brick Lane." Based on the Monica Ali novel of the same name, it opens today at the Manor Theater.

She lives in an anonymous apartment complex where a neighbor's short hair and smoking habit are declarations of independence and a seemingly kindly old woman is really a loan shark. As Nazneen's mother once said, "We must not run from our fate. What cannot be changed must be borne."

Nazneen, 33, longs to return home to Bangladesh, but her husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), has no money for such a trip. He balks at her taking in sewing at home, as some neighbors do, but when he resigns from his job, her piecework earnings come in handy.

It's not the work or even the money, though, that starts to transform Nazneen. It's the British Bangladeshi man, Karim (Christopher Simpson), who delivers and picks up the goods. He takes a shine to her, and Nazneen to him.

"Brick Lane," set against a backdrop of bubbling ethnic tensions fanned by the 9/11 attacks, tracks Nazneen as she re-examines the notion of home, of the sister she longs to see, of the daughters who embody spirit and obedience, of the husband who has shared her life for 16 years.

Although it would be easy to portray Chanu as an overweight buffoon -- in the novel, she sees his photo before the wedding and thinks "he had a face like a frog" -- the movie does not.

He is an inconsiderate bed mate and sexist breadwinner, but we see that he struggles to fit in, that his dreams have been downsized and that he reacts in a measured manner when others are flame-throwers. Still, the ending seems like a bit of a fairy tale, designed to be a win-win.

But director Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane" belongs to Chatterjee as Nazneen, a woman who finds herself racing and running, but in a different context than in her village. As a child, she was told, "If Allah wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men," but as a woman, she searches for her voice, her desire and her place in the world.

It's a performance of delicacy and carefully calibrated moves. No grand gestures, just grand emotions.