Directed by Jennifer Reeder
Zaynab (Mirza) is a lawyer who takes wrestling lessons. Her father has passed and Parveen, her mother (Azmi), lives with her now. She meets Alma in a bar and they soon start seeing one another although Zaynab isn't comfortable about being out and open about their relationship. Alma's mother used to be a wrestler. Alma is much more open about her preference for women to her mother than Zaynab is to her mother. Parveen is still looking for a husband for her daughter.
This is a fairly short (79 minutes) light comedic movie but it has some serious moments. I enjoyed it quite a bit although there are a few transitions that felt a bit forced or clunky. It got better or I enjoyed it more the further I got into it. A lot of the humor revolved around generational conflict between Zaynab and Parveen.
Zaynab's family is Pakistani-American. Alma's family is Mexican-American. There are parts of the movie that are subtitled because not all of the dialogue is in English. My only complaint there, and maybe this is something that I could have fixed on my TV, is that the subtitles were sometimes hard to read because they blended in with the background. The movie isn't really about wrestling and there isn't a lot of wrestling in this movie but wrestling does play a key role in the movie.
I heard about this movie on an episode of the Movie Bears earlier this year. They interviewed Fawzia Mirza briefly. I'm not big on wrestling but I still enjoy the spectacle every now and then, listen to the Art of Wrestling every week, and have enjoyed watching the first two seasons of GLOW and the GLOW documentary.
The star and co-writer of the movie, Fawzia Mirza, was on a recent episode of Queerie. She doesn't talk about the movie. She talks about her own life and there seems to be parallels between her life and that of Zaynab.
Podcast Link: Movie Bears Podcast - Episode 314
Podcast Link: Queerie with Cameron Esposito - Episode 84 - Fawzia Mirza
No comments:
Post a Comment