Welcome to Polite Society

We chat to We Are Lady Parts creator Nida Manzoor about her debut feature film Polite Society, a riotously funny action-comedy blending sisterly love, teen-girl hi-jinks and flying spin kicks

Interview: Anahit Behrooz

In Nida Manzoor’s hilarious directorial feature debut, the We Are Lady Parts creator explores the intractable bonds of sisterhood through the story of Ria, full-time teenager and stuntwoman-wannabe, and Lena, an art school dropout who – to her sister’s horror – falls fast for an eligible bachelor. Subverting many of the clichés of South Asian diasporic cinema (arranged marriage, parental expectations, filial disappointment), Polite Society draws on fun and familiar film tropes to invent a new and bold British cinematic language – filled with colour and heart. We chat with her about Muslim representation, waxing on screen, and the joys of being over the top.

One of the coolest things about Polite Society is the way you remix different genres – you draw on everything from the Western to heist films and Jane Austen marriage plots. Was this generic mash-up always key to the film? I always loved genre movies growing up and I never got to see myself in them. In a way, this film ended up being an ode to my younger self, like here is a film that has all the things you love, and that you’ve always wanted to be part of. I knew I wanted it to be an action movie about two sisters, because there’s something about being a young woman and the pressures and expectations… it’s these small, unseen violences, but juxtaposed [here] with big, bombastic fights. It was just me making my dream film.

It’s so interesting how you bring a cultural specificity to very familiar tropes. One of the funniest scenes in the film is the waxing scene, where the mother-in-law, Raheela, forces Ria to get a leg wax, but it plays out like a James Bond villain showdown. It just excites me to see this very specific culture that I’m from being represented. There’s a line that Raheela says that’s like, ‘never shave – your hair will grow back twice as thick.’ And my editor was like, ‘do we need that line?’ and I was like, ‘yes!’ That’s the representation I want!

It’s a thing all the older women always say! It definitely feels like there’s a movement towards absurdity in the film, in the way these different cultural ideas juxtapose together. The tone was something that took ages: constant writing and recutting to make sure we build up to this over-the-top, silly tenor. Again, it’s from films that I love, like John Waters movies or Paul Verhoeven – there’s something trashy about it, but not in a bad way.

It’s slightly camp.

Yes, camp! And also growing up on Bollywood, everything was over the top, nothing made sense. Yet somehow the emotions remain true, and I think I wanted to try and execute it where you feel the sisters’ love story, even though everything that’s going on around them is absurd.

I wanted to ask you about this love story. Both We Are Lady Parts and Polite Society have such a strong focus on female intimacy and friendship – what is it about these connections that you find so compelling?

My friendships have been the big romances of my life – there’s something so strong and deep about them. Also with sisterhood: in so many of these stories it’s a husband saving his wife or a father his daughter, but I have such an intense relationship with my sibling and I wanted to explore that. They can also get so messy and ugly. My sister can always say the thing she knows will hurt me most. There’s a cruelty to female friendships, like a shadow side to femininity, that I think is also beautiful.

That darkness very much fits into the punk vibe that both Polite Society and We Are Lady Parts have.

I wanted this to basically be the film that Ria would make if she were to retell this story. It had to be fizzing with energy and bursting at the seams. There is a more stylised, more controlled version of this film where everything’s very steady, whereas my director of photography and I looked at things like Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, where the camera is stylised but it’s very punk. It’s not perfect, and it’s grainy. There’s a kind of raw edge we wanted to give it – even while it’s slick and has these fun transitions, the film still needed to contain this teenage girl’s intense energy.

What is it about punk that keeps drawing you back?

I think just growing up in a culture where you have to be a good girl. And I was definitely someone who struggled against that and whenever I did something like explore the arts, I felt I was transgressing. I felt a lot of shame around my choices and I still struggle with that. And a cathartic way of dealing with it was to make art about women who struggle but who we also see win. I’m definitely drawn to wildness in women – there’s something unapologetic about taking up space.

We also grew up at a time when there wasn’t much Muslim representation on screen, and so we never had that wildness. Is continuing to tell these stories important to you? Yeah, it takes so much life force to make a movie that if I don’t feel passionate and see some part of myself I don’t know if I want to do it. I don’t know whether or not I’ll always do genre mashups but I do love playing with genre and bringing in this silliness. I have ideas that are set in ancient Iraq, like sexy B-movie films. It’s outside my comfort zone but again, it’s about finding that fire and the fizz. Like how does my tone sit there? We Are Lady Parts and Polite Society have helped me hone my voice, and now I’m in my 30s and I feel I’m watching myself evolve.

Like, what is happening here?

Yeah! Like wow, is it not only dick jokes?

Polite Society is released 28 Apr by Universal