Nida Manzoor on POLITE SOCIETY and Feminist Stunt Fighting – Leslie Combemale interviews
There’s not been a film that focused on a South Asian teenage girl quite the way that Polite Society does. For over a decade, London-based writer/director Nida Manzoor has been nuancing the script that is now releasing as her feature debut. Manzoor recently found success on the small screen with her award-winning series We Are Lady Parts, which follows a feminist all-girl Muslim punk band. Still, Polite Society is far more personal to her own life. It springs from her experiences as a sports-playing and karate-trained teenage tomboy who both loved and hated her big sister.
Though at its heart, Polite Society is a love note to sisterhood, it embraces a variety of genres to express the pursuits of ass-kicking South Asian teen Ria (Priya Kansara), who practices hours daily to attain her goal of becoming a famous stuntwoman. In posting to her stunt video blog, Ria often enlists the help of her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya), a beautiful but self-effacing and disillusioned artist. When Lena is entranced by mysterious suitor Salim and Ria sees her big sis starting to morph into a Londoner version of a Stepford Wife, the wannabe stunt performer leaps into action, aided by her trusty pals Clara (Seraphina Beh) and Alba (Ella Bruccoleri). Spectacular fight sequences worthy of a Hong Kong action auteur and impressively complex dance sequences inspired by Bollywood classics like Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas ensue.
In conjunction with Polite Society being selected as the AWFJ Movie of the Week, we caught up with Nida Manzoor and asked her about those action sequences, and the many ways in which she framed the violence traditionally shown from a male perspective as a pervasive experience for girls growing into their womanhood.
Leslie Combemale: You use a variety of fighting styles in the film and collaborated, as you have before, with stunt coordinator, Crispin Layfield, and he brought in fight coordinator, Rob Luck. The fights forward the storytelling and character development. Can you talk about some of your choices and the challenges of staging them as really relevant to plot and character development?
Nida Manzoor: For me, it was always about making sure the fight scenes were speaking to where the characters were at and was revealing something to us about them. For me, too, I love watching women show a kind of fury, and female rage is important to me to see on the screen. Getting to work with Crispin and Rob was a joy. I brought all my film references, all my favorite action scenes, and I felt like a kid in a candy shop, like “Can we do this? Can we do this?” Rob worked so closely with the actors, because being inspired by Hong Kong action films, and why I think those movies work is the actors are doing so many of the stunts. Most of the time, the actors are also martial artists, and there’s a truthfulness in the way they embody the characters. These days there’s such a reliance on CG, and not having the big-name performers who can do the stunts, but I really wanted our cast to do the fights, even if it means they’ll be imperfect. It’s very different and feels so much more authentic when you see an actor actually doing the stunts. Obviously we had incredible stunt women who were working along side us, but it was about empowering the actors to get into the characters through those scenes, and that meant training for weeks and weeks before we shot. It was important to create sequences for the actors that would suit their abilities, and that’s what was so great about Crispin and Rob, they were tailoring the fights not only to what I wanted to achieve, but also to matching the moves to each individual’s skillsets.
LC: You use elements of being a woman in the context of action storytelling that is very specific to our experience, referencing menstrual pain and bikini line waxing as violence. Much of it is about how we go from girls to being women, and how we’re shamed into fitting into society’s little boxes. Can you talk about that, and about using violence to express teenage female rage?
NM: That’s the whole reason I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve been reflecting more recently on why I chose action. Why do I want to tell a story about a teenage girl, about two sisters, and use the action genre. I realized, as I was growing up, going from a child who loved sports, who loved martial arts and then going through puberty and becoming a young woman, it was quite an alienating experience. You, all of a sudden, are objectified by society or treated much differently. I felt a moment where I was sort of divorced from my body, and I used to be such an embodied person. I remember feeling shame around it, because it was changing. People were looking at me differently, and it was important for me to write a film and show characters who are so fully in their bodies, and they are women, and they’re in full possession of their physical selves. That was something that was at the heart of what I wanted to do, and why I wanted it to be an action movie. These are women who are fully embodied, and are working through the shame but are still kicking ass and being awesome.
