Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Polite Society’ on Peacock, a Fun, Vibrant Action-Comedy from Talented Director Nida Manzoor

Polite Society (now on Peacock) is a cleverly calculated martial arts movie with Bollywood flourishes, or maybe it’s a Bollywood movie with martial arts flourishes – or maybe we should just call it a comedy, since the combination of the two would inevitably produce laughter. Nida Manzoor, creator of acclaimed TV series We Are Lady Parts (also on Peacock), writes and directs this genre-slash-genre blend about a Pakistani girl in London who’s doing her damnedest not to submit to the will of cultural tradition and all its archaic patriarchal trappings, even if she has to continually reference The Matrix to do it.

POLITE SOCIETY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) in karate class: Punch punch kick. Punch kick punch. Kick punch kick. You know how it goes. She dreams of being a stuntwoman just like Eunice Huthart – who, in our reality, doubled for the likes of Angelina Jolie and Uma Thurman and has worked as stunt coordinator on Marvel and DC and Star Wars films – and routinely sends her diary-esque emails that have yet to earn a reply. Ria is in high school, and younger sister to Lena (Ritu Arya), a recent art-school dropout who flumps around in bed all day. They’re tight. It’s Ria’s passionate and undying passion to keep her stuntwoman dream alive and to revive Lena’s artist dream, and they will forever thereafter be strong, independent women. In theory anyway; such is the nature of dreams, isn’t it?

As whoever said a long time ago with equal parts cynicism and pragmatism, easier said than done. Lena is stuck in a depression hole. And Ria, try as she might, can’t land her flying reverse spin kick – and as you damn well better know by now, when a movie introduces a failed flying reverse spin kick in the first act, it will inevitably be significantly less failed come the third. Their parents, Fatima (Shobu Kapoor) and Rafe (Jeff Mirza), force them to attend a fancy soiree hosted by the stupidly f—ing rich Shah family lorded over by Raheela (Nimra Bucha), who’s hoping to marry off her son, the very handsome geneticist and hopeless mama’s boy Salim (Akshay Khanna). For reasons that won’t be revealed until the movie needs a big reveal, and a big reveal that’s more diabolical than the fact that she seems to be a nice, decent human being, Lena becomes the target of the arranged marriage, and a mere month later, she’s suitably swept, with ring on finger and plans to move with Salim to Singapore.

This doesn’t sit well with our spirited protagonist. Ria can’t just sit there and watch Lena give up on herself and be assimilated into the gross patriarchal system that has squashed women for centuries. So she recruits her two high-school besties, Alba (Ella Bruccoleri) and Clara (Seraphina Beh), to help her derail the wedding. She tries diplomacy, she tries digging up dirt on Salim, she tries smearing him, but it all fails. And just as we’re about to conclude that Ria might be wrong here and that Salim might just be a perfectly terrific man despite the fact that he kowtows to his manipulative, scheming diabolical mother. Wait, did I reveal too much? Nah – this movie is wholly from Ria’s point-of-view, so of course Raheela’s going to be the villain and need to be martial-artsed right in the pants, right? Yes! No. Maybe! NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Polite Society has the Brit-indie spirit of Attack the Block, the bold title cards of a Quentin Tarantino joint, the feminist overtures of ’22’s The Princess and the rad soundtrack/colorful style combo of an Edgar Wright outing, especially Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Oh, and it has more Matrix references than you can count on one hand.

Performance Worth Watching: Kansara demonstrates the type of agreeable, substantive screen presence that proves her capable of anchoring a feature film – and will probably earn her a phone call from Marvel or Disney or Lucasfilm someday.

Memorable Dialogue: Ria gives it to her sister: “Throwing your life away to marry some rich Mr. Darcy wanker sounds pretty 1800s-retro if you ask me!”

Sex and Skin: Male butts in a locker-room sequence.

Our Take: Let’s see… Pakistani women kicking ass and rebelling against structural-patriarchal tradition… this movie must be… what’s the word… starts with “w”… there it is: winning! Polite Society is a bubbly, frequently amusing charmer that sometimes threatens to become a pastiche of its many influences, and one senses Manzoor using three-quarter-measures while executing cartoonish action that’s ambitious, but ultimately timid (it’s her first feature as director; there likely were budgetary limitations). Sometimes the film tries to do too much, but you can’t fault Manzoor’s enthusiasm, which vibrates through sequences that incorporate the twirling, primary-color dresses of Bollywood with Looney Tunes chopsocky and winking bullet-time maneuvers.

That enthusiasm shines through thematically as well, Manzoor’s screenplay leaning heavy on 21st-century girl-powerisms without getting too heavy-handed or compromising its buoyant sense of humor. In this society, politeness is a tackling dummy waiting for a woman to smash it through a wall, and then another wall, and then another wall, until it lands in the dumpster. In this society, Jane Austen delivers mixed messages. In this society, two simple words knock every man off his game: “heavy flow.” But Polite Society always flows easy, never forgetting that a worthy message and high-energy entertainment can make for a happy marriage.

Our Call: Polite Society is fun, stylish and substantive, so STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.