Director: Nida Manzoor (UK). Year of Release: 2023
The first thing that you notice about Polite Society is the opening song. A bit of surf guitar. A bit of Mariachi trumpet. A lot of sounds that you’d expect to hear in a Bollywood film. It turns out that the song is You Me Bullets Love by The Bombay Royale, who appear elsewhere on the soundtrack. They are very good indeed. As the song plays, we watch the chaotic life of an Asian girl – arriving late for a judo class, cycling past Shepherds Bush tube station, window shopping.
Cut to: another young Asian woman refusing to get out of bed. Ria Khan’s cooler older sister Lena is depressed, having recently dropped out of art college. Her liberal parents had encouraged her to do whatever she wanted, but they look relieved. Mother congratulates her on her brave decision. Now she can get on with life and find a good husband. Father stays in the background and says nothing, Only Ria is disappointed, surely in part because Lena’s rebelliousness shows her what is possible.
For the moment, Ria needs Lena to film her ambitious (and usually unsuccessful) attempts at kung fu moves. At her posh school, Ria announces her ambition to be a stuntwoman – something which is laughed off as unrealistic by her teacher, unlike the classmate who has got a relative at the RSC to find her an internship. Why doesn’t Ria become a doctor – the stock-in-trade for Asian girls who are rich enough to consider a career?
Ria doesn’t let the derision of her teacher put her off, and sends off yet another mail to stuntwoman Eunice Huthart (apparently a real person and former Gladiator). As the film progresses, she engages with a number of staged fights with her adversaries – most notably school bully Kovacs (who is twice her size) and Raheela, Lena’s evil prospective mother-in-law. As we have already seen in the stunts filmed by Lena, which normally end with Ria falling on her arse, she loses as many fights as she wins.
Lena has not just given up on Art. She has also fallen in love with Salim, a 32-year old handsome doctor – a geneticist whose work involves “saving babies and shit”. Salim’s family is much richer than the Khans will ever be. Although he still lives with his mother, to whom he is in thrall, Lena is smitten. She even starts wearing cardigans, for fucks sake. Salim suddenly proposes and is soon to whisk Lena away to live in married bliss in Singapore.
Lia sees no option but to try and break up the marriage. With her friends Clara and Alba in tow, she runs through a series of plans. First diplomacy, trying to make Lena see reason, next muck-raking – putting on a ridiculous moustache to sneak into Salim’s gym and steal his laptop, finally smear tactics – breaking into his house and trying to plant some condoms filled with what looks like cake mix. It is all very silly, and uproarious fun.
I’m not sure if it was something in the press kit, but in the reviews of Polite Society, three names pop up again and again – Edgar Wright, Jane Austen, and Quentin Tarantino. None of the comparisons is helpful without some clarification, so let’s take them one person at a time. Tarantino? Well, Kill Bill has some martial arts in it, and – unusually for Quentin – a three-dimensional role for a woman. That’s all. Next!
The Jane Austen comparison is more interesting, as the film explicitly ridicules the typical Austen plot scenario in which a woman gives up her identity to marry a rich, handsome man. At one stage Ria asks Lena if she’s seriously going to get all Jane Austen on her with a Nineteenth Century plot line and “marry some rich Mr. Darcy wanker”. So yes, Polite Society is like an Austen story, but then again it really isn’t.
And so to Edgar Wright’s films, to which the film is superficially most similar. There are even some overlaps with Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Yet even while I was watching Polite Society, I became increasingly aware of why Wright’s films don’t really work for me. They are populated by self-absorbed male geeks, and by women who behave in a way that only exists in the imagination of male geeks. Among other things, they fancy the geeks and, pace Austen, subordinate themselves to them.
Here, though, the sisters are doing it for themselves. Ria is revolted by the idea of marriage and settling down. A manicure and waxing session is her idea of hell – literally used against her as a form of torture. On a number of occasions, when she needs to outwit male adversaries, Ria mentions menstruation and “heavy flow”, and they look away in discomfort. Whereas in Wright’s films, women are usually idealised and unbelievable, here they are all too human.
Ria is afforded a speech about men where she says: “they just seem to destroy things. The economy, the ocean, the rain forests. I just…I don’t know. It’s like the whole universe needs to revolve around them, bending to their will. Maybe it’s time the universe bends to someone else.” Yet, this is not a film which is anti-men. It’s just really not interested in the vanities of people who have dominated film for too long. Its feminism is based on the belief that women deserve a place at the table too.
Similarly, Polite Society addresses the conflicts of second generation British Asians without pandering to the usual clichés. It revels in traditional dance, and understands the difference between arranged and forced marriages. Ria is disappointed with Lena, not because she allows herself to be married off, but because she falls for all that love shit in the first place. The characters are able to listen to enjoy both traditional music from the Indian sub-continent and Western rock music.
Like We Are Lady Parts, the tv show created by writer/director Nida Manzoor, Polite Society doesn’t always work and the individual scenes are of varying quality. But the film’s combination of joy, rage, and silliness mean that we can forgive its flaws. And then, just as we think it can’t get any better, the final credits roll and we hear Poly Styrene singing X-Ray Spex’s Identity. At least in the screening I was in, everyone stayed in their seats until the song was over. A fitting ending to a surprisingly good film.
CinePhil 