Starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Christopher Simpson, and Satish Kaushik. In English and Bengali with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 4, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

There’s a great story struggling to escape Brick Lane, a disappointing if superficially attractive feature debut from Sarah Gavron. Writers Abi Morgan and Laura Jones (a frequent Jane Campion collaborator) worked up a serviceable script from Monica Ali’s popular novel of the same name. The film, however, never gets going, thanks to too many flashbacks, dreamy repetitive devices, and generally dull direction and acting.

The performance part really matters with lead Tannishtha Chatterjee, who has luminous eyes but apparently few of the other skills necessary to illuminate the inner life of a character who says and does very little on-screen. On paper, it’s not hard to get inside the head of someone like her Nazneen, a Bangladeshi villager married at 17 to a much older man and sent away from home and beloved sister to cold, faraway Britain. Certainly, these passively reluctant brides, stuck between worlds, exist in every country. But Nazneen’s tale remains curiously inert, with the audience left as blank and bewildered as she appears to be.

The woman hardly seems to know her young daughters, and a furtive affair with Karim (Christopher Simpson), a hunky neighbour with militant leanings, comes across as more decorative than sensual, let alone threatening. She has, obviously, found no rapport with her oafish, corpulent husband (Satish Kaushik), who comes across as a South Asian Shrek, with the laughs all at his expense.

The director exhibits no special feel for the East London neighbourhood of the title street, circa the beginning of the decade, so she settles for generic shorthand, with many underlined close-ups where a simple glance or gesture would suffice. As compensation for shallowness, the husband is given more sympathy toward the end, but—as with the inclusion of 9/11 as a plot turn—nothing seems to give the story the gravity it needs.