Sundance Review: POLITE SOCIETY is a Fun and Flashy, Action-Packed Film With Heart
Full of bright colors and fantastic fight scenes, Polite Society, written and directed by Nida Manzoor, is part coming-of-age comedy, part action movie. There’s even a dance number!
Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) is your average quirky school kid with the dream of becoming the world’s best stuntwoman. In her free time, she films videos of her stunts with the help of her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya). Lena has dropped out of art school, but Ria still firmly believes her sister is destined to become a great artist. Things shift when Lena starts dating the son of a wealthy family, and Ria’s expectations are shattered when Lena announces after only a month that they are going to marry.
Ria simply cannot understand her sister’s motives. What on earth could possibly be more important than following your one big dream? She becomes determined to break up the wedding and convince her sister that she is really an artist, not some trophy wife. It’s easy to see that Ria’s hopes for her sister are closely tied to her own personal dreams of success, and thus the personal stakes are even greater.
While this film isn’t super provocative, it is tremendously imaginative and has a lot of heart. Ria’s fight sequences and the blend of reality and fantasy reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A lot of inspiration was taken from other films, but the cool mix of genres makes it feel fresh. And the supporting characters add authenticity to scenes of otherwise goofy hijinks. I really liked this film and can’t wait to see what Nida Manzoor does next!
Here’s the full description from Sundance, and you can watch the trailer here:
A London schoolgirl and tireless martial-artist-in-training, Ria Khan is determined to become a world-renowned stunt woman. She’s crushed when her big sister, Lena, drops out of art school, starts dating Salim — the charming, wealthy son of the prominent Shah family — and announces, after barely a month, that they plan to marry and move to Singapore! How could Lena abandon her artistic dreams to become some trophy wife? But Ria soon realizes that something isn’t right, leaving her no choice but to enlist her friends in a daring mission to kidnap Lena from her own wedding.
The wickedly funny, cinematically exuberant debut feature of Nida Manzoor (creator of We Are Lady Parts), Polite Society is an Austenesque tale of two sisters (one in wedding shackles) by way of a loving, anarchic mashup of genres (action comedy, heist, martial arts, Bollywood, social horror). Moreover, it’s an ingenious refashioning of British diasporic storytelling. Newcomer and force of nature Priya Kansara leads an amazing cast, including Ritu Arya as Lena and Nimra Bucha as the nefarious Shah matriarch.
