At the end of Nida Manzoor's Polite Society the story is resolved and the credits start to roll, and this is soundtracked by the irresistible racket of X-Ray Spex's Identity. You can't go wrong with a bit of X-Ray Spex, I always feel, but on this occasion the mixture of energy, earnestness, and attitude which epitomises the band in so many ways felt particularly appropriate. Polite Society doesn't have a particularly punky aesthetic to it, but it does feel cheerfully out-of-control a lot of the time.

This is a Working Title production, a name which has become synonymous with a certain type of slightly formulaic rom-com (as we discussed when a recent Working Title film, What's Love Got To Do With It?, crossed our path). This is not one of those films, however, although there is obviously a sort of resemblance and it does feature a wedding. We should bear in mind that it was Working Title who got Edgar Wright started as a film director, as this is much more like one of his films than any of Richard Curtis' most successful projects.

Priya Kansara plays Ria Khan, a British Asian girl of Pakistani heritage whose goal in life is to become a stuntwoman; her role model and the poster on her wall is Eunice Huthart, winner of Gladiators in 1994, stunt double for everyone from Famke Janssen to Angelina Jolie, and latterly a veteran stunt co-ordinator with credits on some huge movies. (Of course I know who Eunice Huthart is; it's the rest of you who are a bit strange.) Needless to say her strict and traditionalist parents do not approve of this, nor are they very happy about her big sister Lena (Ritu Arya) wanting to be an artist.

However, Lena is reconsidering her artistic career after a bit of a wobble, rather to Ria's dismay, and things get worse after their mum (Shobu Kapoor, who – here comes another blast from the nineties – played Gita in EastEnders for five years) wangles an invite to the Eid soiree of the very glamorous and wealthy Raheela (Nimra Bucha). Dismay becomes outright horror when Raheela's handsome, wealthy, geneticist son Salim (Akshay Khanna) takes a shine to Lena and starts courting her very assiduously. Romance, marriage, and a rapid move to Singapore all seem to be on the cards.

But Ria suspects that something else may be afoot here, having come across evidence that Salim and Raheela have an ulterior motive for wanting to find a bride. Quite what that motive is she's still trying to figure out, but in the meantime the only thing a loving little sister can reasonably be expected to do is try to discover the truth about Salim, spread some dirt, and if necessary actively try to sabotage the relationship. Of course, she could just be upset about potentially losing a sister and imagining it all, but that's not a possibility she really has time to consider properly in the circumstances.

It feels like there have been quite a few films about the experience of young people from an Islamic Pakistani background trying to negotiate a path between their ancestral culture and the one they're living in; certainly enough for a few tropes and conventions to develop. A close family, a wider society where everyone takes a close interest in each other's business; a well-meaning but ineffectual dad, and a panther mum; stricter parenting than the kids would like, and a general sense of 'if it was good enough for our ancestors it's good enough for you'. Perhaps it's not a surprise that so many of these films are rom-coms of one kind or another. Polite Society (this is really a fridge title, by the way) isn't actually a rom-com, for all that it features a romance and a wedding, but most of the tropes are present and correct.

This is about the limit of the film's conventionality, though. How to explain what this film is like? Well, let me put it this way – if Shaun of the Dead is what happens when someone rather wittily mashes the classic Working Title rom-com with a George Romero zombipocalypse horror film, Polite Society is probably the end result of a slightly less witty collision between the sort of mixed-heritage comedy drama I've been talking about and a kung fu movie made by people who've been eating too much cheese. The genre mash-up is not handled with a great deal of finesse; perhaps this is intentional. Lena and Ria will be arguing about the former's plans for her future, and then suddenly they will start slamming each other into the furniture and drop-kicking each other through closed doors. It's not as if the fights are somehow fantasy sequences, a metaphorical representation of the emotional conflict going on – they really are laying into each other (though the various cuts and bruises inflicted usually vanish almost at once).

It is, as I say, really odd, and needless to say the tone of the film is wildly all-over-the-place – one minute it's a quite naturalistic and affecting story about family conflict, the next it turns into a bizarre comedy-thriller about illegal experiments in human cloning, with a potentially challenging fixation on gynaecological matters (possibly no previous Working Title film has featured the word 'womb' in its dialogue so frequently).

Now if it were me, the logical way of doing this would be to start in a recognisably 'normal' world and gradually introduce the more outlandish elements in the course of the story, sort of incrementally casting loose from reality. But this film just veers back and forth between the two modes, although it naturally gets progressively madder as the story continues.

Does it work? I would struggle to call it completely successful, as baffling and wrong-footing the audience is seldom a great approach to telling a story. The cast attack it with great gusto, and Kansara and Arya are very probably stars in the making, but it's not quite funny enough to really work as a top-flight comedy. As the climax approaches, however, it does start to hang together a bit more and there are some impressive set pieces here – a traditional Pakistani wedding, with everyone in their elaborate formal attire, suddenly degenerates into an intricately-choreographed mass brawl, while I feel the world has been missing the sight of someone in traditional Pakistani dress performing a spinning aerial reverse kick on someone.

There is clearly great talent and imagination at work here, but normally I would suggest that Nida Manzoor hasn't quite got Edgar Wright's talent when it comes to making this sort of thing work. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure that Manzoor hasn't made exactly the film she wants to, tonal inconsistencies and incongruities and all. Either way, it's a hard film to actually dislike.

Awix

15.05.23 Front Page

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