Nida Manzoor created We Are Lady Parts for Channel 4, a sitcom about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band; now, for her debut feature film, she brings serious levels of goof, wack and zane for a feelgood action comedy with a very incorrect adjective in the title. It stars newcomer Priya Kansara as a young girl from a British-Pakistani family: Ria, a year 11 martial arts enthusiast and wannabe stuntwoman on a desperate mission to sabotage her older sister’s marriage to a guy that somehow only she can see is a sinister creep.
Kansara does a lot of her own gonzo stunts and kickboxing moves, and the sheer energy and full tilt comedy she brings to them had me thinking of the young Jackie Chan in Drunken Master. Manzoor’s film also has bits of Jane Austen, Kevin Kwan and Gurinder Chadha, with a cheeky homage to the Chuckle Brothers in the sequence in which two people must carry a heavy box down the stairs.
Kansara’s Ria obsessively practises her fight moves, recording them for her YouTube channel and yearns to be a stunt artist, to the dismay of teachers at her posh school. But she is poignantly upset, in ways that she can’t quite describe, by the unhappiness of her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya), who appears to have given up on her own dream of being an artist and is sinking into depression. But then their mum and dad – great performances from Shobu Kapoor and Jeff Mirza – are absolutely thrilled at a sudden marital miracle on the horizon. An extremely eligible, wealthy young man, Salim (Akshay Khanna), a doctor who does loads of caring medical research, is interested in dating Lena. Ria can see that there is something a bit off about this guy, and she doesn’t care for Lena’s future overbearing mother-in-law, played by Nimra Bucha.
Polite Society is a pointed satire of the marriage market, a world in which secondary education is offered to young women on the understanding that they must surrender to demure wifehood a few years later than normal. And its macabre plot twists show how this same marriage market infantilises young men, revealing an awful truth to brides as to who exactly is the most important woman in the groom’s life. Manzoor’s fight scenes, so amusingly executed by Kansara, effectively dramatise the terrible struggle that women are going to endure – especially the ongoing duel with that certain special in-law. This film delivers a spinning back kick of laughs.
• Polite Society is released on 28 April in US, UK and Irish cinemas.
