Polite Society

I’m not even sure what the expectations are meant to be otherwise, but the flick doesn’t really conjure up many alternatives beyond “marry and start breeding”.

Ria is still in high school, though, so thankfully it’s not a flick about her avoiding an arranged marriage. It’s a flick about where Ria cannot abide the idea of her sister entering into any marriage, arranged, parentally supported or otherwise.

Let’s be clear – this is a martial arts flick in idea only. Sure, Ria practices a lot, and films herself trying to perform a spinning flying kick. But nothing really places her in the context of being a martial artist other than maybe she just really wishes she was.

When she brawls with her nemesis Kovacs (Shona Babayemi) at school, it’s not clear to the audience that what Ria imagines is happening is what other people are seeing around them – the level of destruction is cartoonish and comical, and you’d think would result in court cases and arguments about criminal liability etc.

But really it feels like it’s played for laughs. After an Eid party (most of the characters are Muslim in the context of the “polite society” of vicious relatives and “aunties”) at the house of an obscenely wealthy widow with an eligible son, Lina begins a relationship with a handsome doctor (Akshay Khanna), and seems like she really likes him.

Ria does not and will not accept any of this. For a while, the flick goes along with what she’s saying and doing as if she’s not completely fucking nuts, but in due course Ria’s behaviour starts seeming less like the over-protectiveness of a younger sister and more the actions of an absolute psychotic.

It’s not even an argument about patriarchy this or gendered expectations that. Lina, genuinely depressed about her life and her failures at college gets some kind of reprieve from herself from spending time with someone exciting and new, and the prospect of completely getting the fuck out of dodge and doing something different with her life is very appealing. Salim, the boyfriend / fiancé, is a handsome doctor, did you say? What’s not to like?

Ria and Lina’s parents, who are not complete ogres, are happy for Lina as well, and are presumably looking forward to grandkids (probably male ones, but who knows). Even Ria’s best friends at school, loyal to her to a fault, eventually realise Ria is nuts.

The absolute nadir arrives when Ria thinks she’s justified in breaking into Salim’s house and planting some seemingly used condoms in Salim’s room.

I have no idea how she thought that was going to do anything, but after stealing laptops, going undercover, doing all sorts of dumb shit, the tainted condoms are the only way!!!!

The flick doesn’t resort to Ria trying to runover Salim and Lina in order to make it stop, but she reaches absolute rock bottom when she alienates absolutely everyone with her horrible antics.

It prompts a fight with her sister, which forces Lina to state out loud that she herself was never going to be an artist, and Ria is never going to be a stuntwoman.

Ouch.

Fair call though. There is absolutely no evidence thus far of anything untoward, except that maybe Salim is a bit too close to his mother, Raheela (Nimra Bucha).

Raheela is very rich and is the Regina George of Pakistani/Londoner society, with immense wealth and a steely manner. However, she is also quite terrifying.

Any other film would show Ria getting the mental health support that she needs in order to cope with her debilitating paranoia and possible schizophrenia / dissociative disorder. Instead this flick doubles the fuck down, and proves positive the old adage and Nirvana lyric that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t some weird conspiracy at play around you.

From this point on it’s safe to say without spoiling too much that the flick goes completely bonkers with a weird plot, but maintains all that with a comedic, some might even say silly tone. It becomes a kind of heist movie whereby Ria and her friends, and even her “enemy”, have to figure out a way to save Lina.

And she does it in fine style. Priya Kansara brings both absolute conviction and maximum goofiness to this central role, which is more of a tightrope walk than it sounds. She sells the dastardly bits, she sells the psychotic bits, but once the time comes for her to nail that dance routine to celebrate the wedding, or that spinning kick she tries so hard to perfect, or more importantly, reconcile with her sister and her dearest friends (who are the only thing keeping her out of jail or a psych ward, methinks). And she sells the comedic aspects as well, so it’s a win for us all.

I haven't even mentioned Ritu Arya as big sister Lina. I think she's great in other stuff, most notably as the feral Lila in the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, but here she's more of a damsel in distress. She's still pretty fiery fighting back against Ria's idea of who she should be as a person, who she "has" to be in order to conform to Ria's expectations.

Ria's two friends, Clara (Seraphina Beh) and Alba (Ella Brucolleri), the token non-POC in the movie, are golden creations, and the best friends a person could ever have or deserve. The flick would be a pale, unfunny shadow without them and their snappy remarks.

I think (eventually) the flick gets the tone right, and the energy, the goofiness, the humour keep the momentum going (especially with the fights at the end against various aunties or the villainous Raheela herself.

As a female-led production and ensemble, as I would expect from the writer / creator of We Are Lady Parts, the flick mines a bunch of stuff you wouldn’t expect in your average culture clash / the fuck are you getting married for? comedy with action stylings. Cue the scenes where they blag their way past an armed bodyguard by merely referring to menstrual periods, which makes the average man switch his ears and brain all the way off the second “period!” is spoken out loud, with the magical force that it projects. There are a stack of other touches as well which I appreciated.

The one thing a person shouldn’t expect going in to this is an ovaries-the-the-wall action flick. This is not that flick. They didn’t have the budget for massive set pieces or hours of people punching and kicking each other in the face. Every time Ria tries and fails to do that spin kick it’s obvious she’s floating about on a harness like a puppet being yanked on its strings.

And that’s absolutely fine. We don’t need more Matrix movies or Hidden Dragons Crouching behind Tigers or anything, or Wick movies. There are already too many.

Polite Society. It’s never Polite, but it’s consistently funny / amusing, and that’s way better.

8 ways this flick is about how it should always be Sisters Before Misters out of 10

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“The gods whispered to the warrior, 'You will not withstand the fury.' The warrior whispers back, 'I am the fury!’” – you sure are - Polite Society