A fair number of Bollywood movies have stories that stretch out over decades so that the same actor portrays a father and then his son. Rarely do we see this happen with the same actress portraying a mother and daughter, but that is exactly what happens in The Queen of My Dreams, which is not a Bollywood film but rather a movie about a Pakistani family that emigrates to Canada. The protagonist points out the Bollywood convention and observes that it must be weird for lead actresses to play the wife to the lead actor and also play his mother. If this autobiographical film isn’t quite as revolutionary as that promises, it’s still something that showed me a place and time that I was unaware of, and it’s opening this week at AMC Grapevine Mills.
The movie plays out in two timelines. In 1969, Mariam (Amrit Kaur from TV’s The Sex Lives of College Girls) is a young woman in Karachi who marries handsome young doctor Hassan Malik (Hamza Haq) and, very much against the wishes of her mother (Gul-e-Rana), leaves the country when his job takes him to Nova Scotia. Thirty years later, their daughter Azra (Kaur again) is a lesbian pursuing an M.F.A. in acting in Toronto when she receives the news that her father has died suddenly while visiting his relatives in the old country. She has to travel to Pakistan, though as a woman, she can’t take part in much of the funeral — this is less a Muslim thing than a South Asian thing, as many Hindus discourage women from certain funeral rituals — and she has to reconcile with her mother (Nimra Bucha), who is in denial about her daughter’s homosexuality and refers to her white girlfriend (Kya Mosey) as her roommate.
Writer-director Fawzia Mirza started this story as a similarly named short film, then turned it into a stage play called Me, My Mom & Sharmila, referring to Sharmila Tagore, a real-life Bollywood star from the 1960s. One of the things that this movie does is give us a portrait of Pakistan that’s different from the one in our imagination. Pakistan in the late 1960s is a place of freedom where women go around with their heads uncovered, listening to the Beatles, and drinking whiskey, albeit pretty bad whiskey. In addition to the timelines, the film occasionally changes aspect ratio and breaks into musical numbers shot in saturated 1960s Technicolor in the manner of Aradhana, the 1969 Tagore film that Mariam and Azra both cherish.
I do feel compelled to point out that The Queen of My Dreams doesn’t quite hang together either as a coming-out story or as a Künstlerroman that tells the story of an artist’s formative years. The film is supposed to hang on a discovery that Azra makes about her family’s history that her mother doesn’t know about, and that revelation is treated like a throwaway by the director. Yet the movie goes down easily like a mango lassi, and Mirza shows some intriguing talent in this, her first feature film. This modest film ended up broadening my horizons, and that is worth a trip to the theater.
The Queen of My Dreams
Starring Amrit Kaur and Nimra Bucha. Written and directed by Fawzia Mirza, based on her own short film and stage play. Not rated.
