‘Polite Society’ Review: Pride & Plenty Of Fists

This exuberant genre mash-up borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to tell the story of two sisters.

Polite Society, a rollicking genre mashup, is set in an enclave of well-to-do Muslim Londoners who play along with the comedy’s title until they get cranky. Then come the punches and neck chops, the bruises and broken glass, the ludicrous wire-fu that allows a matron in a brocade lehenga to fly through the air.

It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.

The story hinges on two sisters. Lena Khan (Ritu Arya), the eldest, is an art school dropout with a Joan Jett shag who skulks around like a raccoon, wild eyes smudged with dark liner, unwashed body crouched over a whole roast chicken which she devours barehanded on a public sidewalk. She’s a mess and quite possibly depressed.

But to her younger sister, Ria (Priya Kansara), a budding stunt performer, Lena is perfect — until Lena falls in love with a wealthy doctor named Salim (Akshaye Khanna) and instantly transforms from a hoodie-wearing slob into a cardigan-clad fiancée.

Ria, our protagonist, vows to stop the wedding. She enlists her best friends Alba (Ella Bruccoleri) and Clara (Seraphina Beh) in the cause, who step into view, one on each of Ria’s elbows, with the snap of backup dancers.

Stubborn and snotty, Ria is so hellbent on breaking up the betrothal that she’s willing to spy and lie, claw and kick. She gets as good as she gives, ending more than one scene in a bloody, heaving heap. At the same time, the audience can appreciate what Ria is too childish to see: Lena’s joy that the neighbourhood screw-up has landed its most eligible bachelor.

A simpler tale would frame Ria’s outrage as feminist versus traditionalist, flattening her sister into a pawn used by their Pakistani parents (Jeff Mirza and Shobu Kapoor) to gain entry into a fancier echelon of Eid parties hosted by Salim’s mother, Raheela Shah (Nimra Bucha). But Manzoor doesn’t buy into binaries.

Yet, Lena chooses Salim of her own free will — and beds her husband-to-be before the ceremony without flushing in shame to bump into her future mother-in-law at the breakfast table. Manzoor couldn’t be less interested in writing victims or role models.

Here, as in her marvelous six-episode sitcom We Are Lady Parts, about an all-girl Muslim punk band, Manzoor views the overlapping identities of being young and female and devout-to-varying-degrees as though, together, they form a kaleidoscope of possibilities.

Look at all these new characters we can create, her work seems to say, as she presents a punk band manager who vapes underneath a pleather niqab. Isn’t the world more exciting with all of these jagged colours?

The pace of Polite Society is hectic. Scenes smash into the next, each new act announcing itself in a mustardy all-caps font. Cinematographer Ashley Connor seizes every chance to peacock with a zippy rack focus as the soundtrack thumps with a terrific mix of old and new bangers from all corners of the globe. Sound effects whoosh past the ears with giddy abandon.

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Howling desert winds set the tone of a high school hallway smackdown; a few scenes later, a bedroom fist fight climaxes with a clatter of bells, thunderclaps and an eagle screech.

During that battle, one of the brawlers is clad à la Uma Thurman in a white button-down, black slacks and black bangs — Manzoor’s bring-it-on taunt to audiences who might say she’s photocopying Quentin Tarantino.

The director might counter that like Tarantino, she’s drawing her inspiration from the source, back to when the wuxia women of the 1970s could literally slay without having to give a whole speech about gender politics.

One can easily imagine Manzoor’s eyes rolling at the moment in Avengers: Endgame when 10 female superheroes assembled for a prom photo before charging into battle. (And one can also imagine Marvel dialling her up tomorrow with an offer to direct her own.)

Polite Society

Rated: PG-13 for colourful violence, colourful language and a dash of sexual implications.

Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theatres now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Amy Nicholson

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