Action Comedy Meets Cultural Comedy in ‘Polite Society’

by

Stories from Britain’s Indian-Pakistani population have made their way to cinemas over the past decades, notably Bend it Like Beckham (2002), about a teenage girl who wants to play soccer. Polite Society, which debuted recently at Sundance, is also about a teenage girl navigating between parental expectations and her own dreams. Polite Society’s protagonist, Ria (Priya Kansara), wants to be a movie stuntwoman, persisting despite raised eyebrows from career counselors, parental dismay and her movie industry role model’s refusal to answer her emails. 

Polite Society travels far from tourist London, cycling down backstreets lined with small shops and ethnic grills, through outdoor market stalls under a commuter train bridge and into the red brick row house where Ria lives with her comfortably middle class, modestly aspiring Anglo Pakistani family. She also dwells inside a vividly imaginative world where she is her own kung-fu fighting superhero called Fury. She tries to fly like the characters from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but topples to the floor often enough.

The writer-director of this zany comedy, Nida Manzoor, knows the field well. Her parents wanted her to be a lawyer, but she opted instead for television and, with Polite Society, her feature film debut. She cites Jackie Chan and the Coen brothers as inspiration. Chan because Ria studies martial arts and hopes to leap from the dojo to the big screen. The Coens because on one level Polite Society is a movie about movies, an ironic commentary on how screen life shapes the way people imagine real life.

The plot turns around the impending marriage of Ria’s sister, Lena (Ritu Arya), to Salim (Akshay Khanna), the son of a wealthy Anglo Pakistani family. Ria and Lena had been close and supportive, Lena helping Ria shoot YouTube videos of her stunts and Ria encouraging Lena’s painting. But Lena feels frustrated and dead-ended in art school. Could her next step be marriage into a wealthy family, to a handsome and successful geneticist who seems to love her? 

Ria is determined to stop the wedding and wages a campaign to take down the fiancé with the help of a pair of school friends who can’t imagine any scenario that doesn’t resemble the terse pacing of television drama. One of Polite Society’s funniest scenes involves the girls infiltrating the men’s locker room at Salim’s gym. With Mission Impossible timing and surveillance, they snag the laptop from his locker and download the contents, looking for the smoking guns that aren’t there.

Polite Society is also a satire of the Anglo Pakistani elite, an outpost of Islam where Eid is lavishly celebrated with cocktails and hajibs are nowhere in sight. Hypocrisy and materialism are presented as the alternative to Ria’s fantasy. Her parents are flustered and well meaning; mom is out of place at the upper echelon high teas where expensively dressed, middle aged women with reptilian smiles exchange gossip and veiled recriminations. The film’s scenario moves swiftly along, sometimes to the rhythm of a Bollywood score.

Polite Society is screening at Marcus South Shore, AMC Mayfair, Marcus Ridge, Marcus Majestic, Marcus Menomonee Falls and Marcus Renaissance cinemas.