Polite Society

Over the credits, Polite Society plays X-Ray Spex's Identity, Poly Styrene's strident vocals still as powerful almost 50 years after they were recorded. It's an apt choice, almost note perfect, and I start at the end because Polite Society is so certain in its course and headlong towards it that X must mark the spot. Why? It's a treasure.

It screened as the closing gala of Glasgow's 2023 Film Festival, and in the press showing Eye For Film caught, many of those in the audience had already seen it. As critics we don't always get the choice of what we see, but that makes it all the more important to choose what we see twice. Polite Society deserves that kind of attention, rewards it with detail, delight.

It's a début feature for writer/director Nida Manzoor. Her breakthrough work was tv-show based on a short, We Are Lady Parts. The travails of a PhD student who becomes lead guitarist for an all-female Muslim punk band have aesthetic parallels with this film, but chief among them is verve.

Priya Kansara is Ria, enlisting her pals Clara (Seraphina Bey) and Alba (Ella Bruccoleri) to save her sister from marriage. All three have had recurring roles in TV shows to various degrees, including stalwarts like Holby City, EastEnders, and Call The Midwife. Ritu Arya as Lena is similarly credited, in ongoing actor mill Doctors. The chemistry between them all is great, and as an older sibling myself there's a very particular look of incredulity that I recognise.

Elsewhere detail abounds. That a 1966 Ford Thunderbird Convertible in metallic baby blue is a present is one thing, that it's given to a London schoolgirl on her 16th is another. That's wrong, but it's a very particular kind of wrong. It's one of a suite of signifiers in a story absolutely bound up in complex intersectionalities. I started trying to track down a shooting location with views overlooking St Paul's knowing that it'd be like window-shopping for jets, and gave up when I found one hawking a Cuba Libra for 15 quid. There might be a joke about arranged match-making while discovering how much being in the other half costs, but if I've a class-conscious slope to my shoulders it definitely balks at paying £6 for chips.

Costuming is bang on, from wedding dresses to whatever one calls the outfit worn to buy whole Chinese barbeque window chickens while stoned. The soundtrack is full of bangers, some used in a way that doesn't so much suggest a debt to Tarantino as the maturation of an initial investment. Not merely copying, however, it is more complicated in its tributes. We have here a film made by a maker who's grown up with filmmakers influenced by that kind of cultural sense and sensibility, but one that's polyglot, cosmopolitan. I had to change venue to discover that those would seem to be on the outs fashion-wise, but there was a choice of other things martini-like for about 18 pounds (including service charge). If I seem hung up on how much things cost it is in part because I'm a Scot currently in Yorkshire and there's something parsimonious in the water. It's also because that's one of the details in Polite Society. One never discusses these things, of course, but they're all around.

One also never discusses twists. There is one, sort of, because things are not as they seem. How that resolves is one of the film's many delights. In tone and feel and sheer gleeful invention I was reminded of Boots Riley's Sorry To Bother You, of Jordan Peele's Nope, other films I enjoyed enough to see (or plan to see) more than once. These are films that assume a certain willingness to play along, that reward an understanding of the rules with subversions and reversals. I could go into chapter and verse about title cards and title fights, how wall and wire-fu and a nod to the Karate Kid give this a martial and marital artistry, but one of the most compelling bits of physicality was a bit of spit on a mother's thumb.

There's unbridled talent on display here, behind and before the camera. The barrier to entry of this Polite Society isn't a secret handshake but some of your time and money. Having talked about cost and price a few times, it's well worth both. Manzoor and everyone else have made a film whose events are incredibly specific but which can (and should) be enjoyed by wide audiences. There won't be many films this year where a schoolgirl's letters to a stunt performer are used as epistolary exposition, and there are probably even fewer where the kind of institution that expects those as vocabulary descends into a lively altercation in a library alcove. Getting on board might require a leap of faith, but if you've ever enjoyed a heist movie, a martial arts epic, a comedy of errors or a marriage plot then know that Polite Society hits its marks and sticks the landing. Possibly even with three limbs, superhero style.