It sometimes seems that there is but one true erotic taboo left in a cinema obsessed with body parts and bodily fluids. And if the taboo of Islamic infidelity was ever going to fall, it would have to happen in a story set outside the Middle East, in "Bangla City" on Brick Lane in London, for instance.

But "Brick Lane" isn't some "Desperate Islamic Housewives." This movie traffics in the eroticism of a glance held too long; a moment's contact, hand on hand, as a tea cup is passed. Romantic, surprising and wise, it's an Anglo-Bangladeshi "Brief Encounter," that 1940s model of forbidden love and British responsibility, glimpsed on a TV in "Brick Lane."

Brick Lane is where Nazneen lives. She's the narrator who remembers, as a girl, her determination to not leave her pastoral, pretty homeland, promising her sister that "I will not marry and be sent far away" from her Bangladesh village.

But that is exactly what happens. Her father pairs her up with "an educated man" in London when she is 17, and she dutifully goes there to make a life with a husband she has never met.

Sixteen years later, she is a struggling housewife and mother of two stuffed into a tiny London flat, married to a self-important, blubbery buffoon (Satish Kaushik) whose pride takes precedence over all, whose yen for "tradition" seems only to serve his sexist purpose of dominating his wife, children and household.

Nazneen, played with shy grit by Tannishta Chatterjee, has absorbed one great lesson from her homeland: "Endure." She suffers the loveless marriage, the lousy sex, her increasingly British and increasingly rebellious daughters, the sister she has been too long separated from. But she cannot do this with a smile.

Nazneen's world changes when a more liberated neighbor moves in, tips her as to how much money she can make sewing, and then lends her an old sewing machine. Nazneen can save for the plane tickets herself. She can take control of her fate.

And there's a bonus. The jobber who delivers her the jeans to be finished is a handsome younger man, Karim (Christopher Simpson). It's obvious from the start that Karim is smitten by his new seamstress. When she begins to wear a smile any time she thinks of him, it's obvious the feeling is mutual.

Sarah Gavron's patiently paced film based on a Monica Ali novel takes both predictable turns and unexpected detours. The husband may be a bore, but he's not abusive. This isn't "The Color Purple." Chanu may be an object of fun, harrumphing about his "education," but he has depth beneath the layers of fat he has put on since their marriage. The adulterous affair isn't as chaste as your typical Indian or Pakistani film would present it. This is as down and dirty as a PG-13 film will allow.

And Gavron hides the film's time setting for a reason, using recent history as a jumping off point for a major change in direction in the story and in the world that holds this love triangle of Nazneen, Chanu and Karim.

As timely as today's headlines and as sympathetic as any movie about adulterous love can be, "Brick Lane" opens a window on lives many of us wouldn't give a thought to, and how our Western ways are changing those lives, by design or by accident, one person at a time.