Nida Manzoor’s debut is a fizzing comedy about a girl who would rather fight than lose her sister, and Priya Kansara is a find. It is best in the kitchen; the last act trades the sisters for a plot we neither believed nor laughed at.
Nida Manzoor made We Are Lady Parts for television, and Polite Society is her first film. It is about Ria Khan (Priya Kansara), a schoolgirl who wants to be a stuntwoman, and her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya), who has given up art school and gone to bed. When Lena gets engaged, Ria takes it as a declaration of war and treats the wedding the way she treats everything else, as a fight to be won. The first hour of this is as much fun as we have had at a British comedy in a while. The last half hour is not, and we will explain why without saying what happens.
Kansara is the reason to see it. She is small, quick and permanently affronted, and she plays Ria as a girl who decided who she was before anyone asked. Her fighting looks like her own fighting; you can see her land. She announces “I am the Fury” before her set pieces, and by the third time we were saying it with her. Arya has the quieter part and does more with it than the script gives her. Lena’s misery is the thing the film is actually about, and Arya lets it sit under every joke.
Ashley Connor shoots the fights like westerns, with whip pans and slow zooms into narrowed eyes, and Robbie Morrison cuts them like comics, freezing on a face so a title card can slap down over it. The school fight between Ria and Kovacs (Shona Babayemi) is where the style declares itself: a bout between two teenagers over nothing, filmed with the gravity of a duel. We laughed out loud, and kept laughing, because the film was taking the fight exactly as seriously as Ria was and not a bit more. Shez Manzoor and Tom Howe score it with twanging guitar and Bollywood drums, and the best single sequence is not a fight at all but a dance, Ria performing Maar Dala at the engagement party with the fixed smile of someone planning a crime.
Nimra Bucha’s Raheela, the mother of the groom, is the villain, and she is a good one. PC Williams dresses her in silks in colours nobody else in the film can afford, and Simon Walker gives the Shahs a house that is all white surfaces and glass, set against the Khans’ terrace of coats on banisters and food on every table. Bucha plays Raheela as a woman who has never once been contradicted and finds the experience interesting. Every scene she shares with Kansara has the charge of two people who understand each other far too well.
The trouble starts when the film stops asking whether Ria is right and starts answering. For an hour the joke is that she is a teenager who has read the situation as a film because films are all she knows, and Manzoor’s script keeps you unsure whether the plot is in Lena’s marriage or in Ria’s head. Then it takes the story somewhere we will not describe, except to say it is louder, stranger and much less interesting than what came before. The sisters, who were the point, are kept apart for most of it. The fights get bigger and mean less. The BFI billed this as a Matrix-inspired action comedy, and the last act is where the borrowing shows: bits of Bond, bits of horror, bits of heist, all done capably and none of them hers in the way the kitchen scenes are. We sat there waiting for the film to come back to the two women at the table, and it took its time.
At 104 minutes it is not long, and Morrison keeps it moving even when it has nowhere much to go. Shobu Kapoor and Jeff Mirza, as the parents Fatima and Raff, are warmer and funnier than the plot needs them to be. Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh, as Ria’s friends Alba and Clara, are a proper double act, and we would watch a film about them.
Most critics have gone a little further than we have. They are right about Kansara and Bucha and the first hour; we think the swerve costs more than they allow. Set against British debuts of its kind it is confident, noisy and made by someone who knows exactly what she likes. Watch it with a sibling who has ever annoyed you, and forgive it the ending.
