Writera: Amit Kaur, Nimra Bucha and Hamza Haq
Director: Fawzia Mirza
A jaunty Canadian-Pakistani comedy about death and grief, Amit Kaur, Nimra Bucha and Hamza Haq’s The Queen of My Dreams is also an affirming and uplifting story about motherhood, sexuality and female freedoms in which a mother and daughter clash over her life choices. Applying lessons from Bollywood and celebrating an earlier era of filmmaking, this 90-minute story set in multiple time periods looks at the changing roles for women across the late twentieth-century and the traditional expectations they inherit.
Student Azra lives with her girlfriend but tells her family they are only flatmates. Frustrated by their interference, Azra rarely picks up the phone and misses her father dying in Pakistan. Flying out to join them, Azra is annoyed that a highly gendered society prevents her from taking part in the funeral rituals and it prompts Azra and her mother Mariam to remember good times with their lost relative in the 1960s and 1980s.
A major strand of The Queen of My Dreams places Bollywood star Sharmila Tagore from the film Aradhana in the spotlight, a shared passion between mother and daughter that builds a connection through the story, even when neither of them feels particularly close. It is also the visual inspiration for the 1960s-set sections with their bright pastel hues and stylised visuals that tell the story of a marriage formed in an era of liberation and the beginnings of greater international travel that shakes off family demands to stay in Pakistan. From costume to make-up and hair, young Mariam’s story is nicely realised as a comic roll-call of suitors vie for her hand.
The same attention is paid to the 1980s sequences in which young Azra, growing up in Nova Scotia, makes friends, begins to recognise the same-sex feelings she develops and find her mother relapsing to the old traditions while trying to guide Azra’s life choices. Both of these narratives eventually inform the present which has a teen-movie styling, yet Director Fawzia Mirza’s movie starts to dig deeper into the complexities of gender, family expectation, religious ritual and identity, resulting in a feel-good but hard-won conclusion for Mariam and Azra.
Performances are comically broad by generally emotionally engaging, from Amrit Kaur as Azra and Nimra Bucha as Mariam, particularly the latter whose sorrow for her husband is well played. Kaur also plays the youngest version of Mariam in the 1960s with a verve that ultimately helps to draw parallels between mother and daughter later in the film.
Identity for women in different cultural contexts is one of the film’s biggest debates and the experience that affect Azra in Canada and Pakistan are nicely contrasted, while the excitement and demands of youth alongside the growing conservatism and desire to cling to the established rituals of others as you age. These are held together in The Queen of My Dreams and with its Bollywood base note, who gets to love who, who plays the Prince and how to build a life with someone is woven into this fun and energetic movie that openly and carefully sees all sides.
The Queen of My Dreams is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
