Writer and Director: Layla Abbas
It is always enjoyable to see a film about two ordinary women undermining patriarchal rules and managing to secure a little piece of the world for themselves. In Layla Abbas’ world premiere, Thank You for Banking with Us, screening in the Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival, estranged sisters Noura and Mariam join forces against inheritance laws in Palestine, creating an enjoyable relationship-focused movie about family and the legal process that prioritises the sisterly relationship and the creation character with little sensation.
When their father dies suddenly, Noura quickly phones her sister Mariam and the pair concoct a plan to hide his death until morning so they have time to move money out of his account which will be inherited by his son in America. Doing what they believe their father wanted, the sisters face a number of obstacles, not least needing a man’s approval to cash a cheque, so the siblings look for alternative solutions. But with time running out, Mariam’s family decides to come apart on the same night.
Running at just 90 minutes, Abbas’ film is neatly managed time-limited drama that shows its characters trying to carry out a fairly simple administrative task – cashing a cheque. But pressing against the domestic microcosm that the writer-director creates is a complex network of rules and expectations about how women behave, what they are permitted to inherit, who takes caring responsibilities in society and how society is stacked against them in everyday life.
Speaking to her long-absent brother who has the right to half the house and half the money on his father’s death, Mariam is told that any failures in her marriage are her fault, and if her husband doesn’t beat her or swear at her, then unhappiness is no reason to leave. This context is woven through Abbas’ story with some subtly, this is not a story told in hammer blows but in quiet facts as the sisters are continually given short shrift by the men they encounter, unwilling to help them and insisting that they should never try to cheat or fight the system.
But they do, and the increasingly inventive ways of tracking down the help they need makes Thank You for Banking with Us an unfolding mission, filled with comedy moments and sharp lines between two people who begin the film not enjoying each other’s company but coming together through a common cause. Abbas controls the unfolding tensions within the family nicely, creating chapters that continually bring Noura and Mariam back together but giving the film considerable momentum.
Yasmine Al Massri and Clara Khoury are chalk and cheese as Noura and Mariam, women who chose different paths and resent the judgement of the other. But they convince as siblings begrudgingly finding their need for each other outstrips any antipathy. Like Thelma and Louise, you can’t help rooting for both of them to not only take on a restrictive system that will deny them an equal share but that they find their way back to each other along the way.
Thank You for Banking with Us is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Sisterly caper
