The movie coming of age gets a multicultural punch in front of it. Polite SocietyIt’s a rambling affair about fighting patriarchy and, most importantly, the old-school tiger mothers who support it.
Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and releasing on April 28, Nida Manzoor celebrates feminist independence and rage, albeit embracing feminist independence and rage, powered by Priya Kansara’s fascinating return as a brash girl who didn’t do as she was told. traditions of many cinematic and popular culture influences. Ingenious lines preach individuality while at the same time praising it, as one character puts it, “there’s a reason metaphors are metaphors – because they work.”
In modern-day London, young Pakistani Ria Khan (Kansara) dreams of becoming a stuntman like her big screen idol, spending all her free time training at a martial arts dojo and shooting videos of her moves and efforts in the backyard. , without much success, to perform an impressive counter-rotating roundhouse hit equal to Bruce Lee and Bruce Lee Street Fighter.
Unfortunately, his career aspirations are not supported by almost anyone he knows except his best friends Alba (Ella Bruccoleri) and Clara (Seraphina Beh) and older sister Lena (Ritu Arya). Ria comes under fire when bullied Kovacs (Shona Babeyemi) laughs and is criticized by her parents (Shobu Kapoor and Jeff Mirza) who would rather do something else in her life. As she proclaimed in her performance clips, “I’m the rage!”
While she’s happy to be her younger sister’s cameraman and join her at impromptu dance parties, Lena also has a problem to endure: depression from dropping out of art school. Ria relies on her sister’s creative abilities because she wants to imagine them as vein-to-kindness spirits defying cultural pressures to plan her own satisfying, no-man-required courses. As a result, when the girls are forced to attend a Eid Festival at their mother’s friend Raheela’s (Nimra Bucha) posh mansion, and sparks fly between Lena and the landlord’s dashing geneticist son, Salim (Akshay Khanna) – a victory considering how much he is envied by the single women of the region. – Ria sees this as an insult and betrayal and therefore immediately imagines Salim as Enemy Number One.
As loudly conceived by Manzoor, Polite Society operates as an exciting mix of teen comedy, Bollywood drama, superhero epic, kung-fu action movie and video game adventure; Everything Everywhere at the Same Time– minus the tense, exhausting personal gratification of the Oscar winner. The only thing arrogant in Manzoor’s movie is Ria, who responds to Lena and Salim’s whirlwind flirtation by doubling down on her objections. Kansara is brimming with personality, living in Ria as a go-getter whose stubbornness and toughness are inextricably intertwined, and she generates regular laughs with her perfectly cartoonish frown against Salim, her mother Raheela, and any other adolescent or adult who dares to get in her way. . .
Boasting skirmishes divided into chapters and introduced with on-screen arcade game titles (eg Kovacs Vs. Khan), Polite Society synthesizes elements from multiple sources to create a confident tone of its own.
Polite Society
Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features
While Manzoor’s film consciously owns its formulaic trajectory, he realizes that it is wise to reshape old movements as long as they are overflowing with charisma and energy. Luckily, he has more of both and puts them to good use when Ria convinces Alba and Clara to come up with a three-step plan to thwart Lena and Salim’s marriage. hunk’s laptop Ocean’s Eleven, albeit with sillier disguises and weirder sexual suspense. (One of the girls finds herself in the middle of a meat market.)
Manzoor’s direction is as confident as his writing, oscillating between at-home sitcom swaps between Ria and her rivals and slow-motion shootouts; it strikes a proper balance between stupidity and seriousness until the very end.
Polite Society She loves her protagonist for choosing to rebel against social, cultural and familial expectations, just as she brings together a new spin on familiar material from various walks of life – Pakistani and British, Black and white, male and female. At the same time, he examines it through a variety of traditional cinema lenses, turning the hearings into a tribute to the vitality of tried-and-true standards. In this context, the rare modern film that is forward-thinking and yet refrains from throwing the famous baby out with the bath water.
Ria’s fiery stubbornness is her talent and her curse, and she finally gets in trouble when Lena (in just a month) agrees to marry Salim and move to Singapore. Lena’s wedding is the culmination of a smorgasbord-style climax featuring a choreographed musical number, covert espionage tricks, a kidnapping plot, and multiple battles between heroes and villains. In particular, the positive and negative consequences of both striving for it and hindering it.
To that end, Bucha quickly transforms from an arrogant peripheral figure to a scene-stealing marvel, with her giant smile and electric eyes portraying Raheela as the frenzied version of clingy, demanding, domineering South Asian motherhood.
Polite Society
Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features
Polite Society Finally, she claims that women – and by extension their male partners and children – can only truly be happy when they are given the opportunity to freely choose their destiny. In today’s #MeToo era, this might not seem like a particularly revolutionary idea. Yet in Manzoor’s chosen setting, it resonates as a combative challenge to a deeply ingrained status quo. All in all, Ria’s desire to resolve conflicts and seek autonomy through mutual fist-fighting with her foes feels just right, especially as Manzoor’s writing has a humorous sharpness that befits the protagonist’s prickly courage, underscored by a spa day that amusingly literally turns into a torture session. for having it. .
Pushing aside his male actors, Manzoor’s sure-footed man to please the audience understands that empowerment is not something that is bestowed upon people by others; usually must be taken vigorously. A feminist rallying cry that’s as angry as it is funny.
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