Nida Manzoor’s big-screen debut is an immigrant family dramedy by way of a martial-arts movie, and it’s fun without being satisfying.
, is a schoolgirl who dreams of being a stuntwoman. Her elder sister, Lena , is on her way to becoming a famous artist — or so Ria keeps insisting despite the inconvenient fact that Lena has dropped out of art school, stopped painting, and is in the midst of a depressive episode that has her squatting in an entryway like Gollum to impulse-eat a whole roast duck. This linking of the siblings’ destinies is the crux of the film, the directorial debut ofcreator Nida Manzoor.
These are complicated feelings for anyone to wrestle with, especially someone in the full flush of teenagerdom, butgifts Ria with a stylized approach to contending with them. When she gets into fights with a loathed classmate, with an exasperated Lena, and with Salim’s mastermind of a mother, Raheela , they’re realized as full-on action showdowns involving high kicks, bodies hurled into nearby walls and furniture, and the occasional bit of wirework.
Instead, the fight scenes come across more like an expression of longing, a desire to break free from the expected rhythms of stories about, say, a teenager growing up in a middle-class British Pakistani family.
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