Budding stuntwoman Ria (Priya Kansara), the star of Polite companyhas a reasonable reaction when her family arranges a marriage between her beloved older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) and a smarmy man: Ria wants to thwart the engagement and beat up the guy.
It may seem like a hyperbolic response to growing pains, with Ria turning her fear of losing Lena into an excuse for a Matrix-style fight. But Lena’s mysterious fiancé Salim (Akshay Khanna) and her hulking mother Raheela (Nimra Bucha) actually seem to be up to something nefarious, with Ria and her loyal friends the only people capable of saving Lena from her fate. Director Nida Manzoor weaves it all into an action-packed comedy that’s as much about kicking ass as it is coping with big life changes.
One of the most brutal fights in the entire film is not between Ria and her enemies, but between Ria and her sister. The confrontation begins as a simple quarrel between siblings, but eventually escalates into the sisters smashing into walls and completely through a door, which disintegrates under the impact. It’s chaotic, gory, unapologetically brutal, and absolutely over the top. (Meanwhile, Ria and Lena’s parents, hanging out downstairs, simply sigh and tell them to clean up the rubble they’re creating.)
Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features
“It was one of my favorite scenes to film,” Manzoor told Polygon. “I found it incredibly cathartic to write everything with these two sisters.”
Random objects in Lena’s bedroom become unexpected weapons in battle, from picture frames to heated hair straighteners. Lena’s childhood bedroom is just as much a part of the action in the scene as the two girls, which Manzoor considered particularly important.
“I was also inspired a lot by Jackie Chan movies,” Manzoor says. “And what he does is really use his environment in a fight. It locates and grounds a fight scene, as it uses bits and pieces from the set. That’s why I wanted to involve the hair straightener. I wanted to have a picture frame with them two there [turned into a weapon], and use the door. It inspired me to ground the fight in its truth.
For all the fights in Polite company, Manzoor watched his favorite action movie sequences. One scene she kept coming back to was the fight between Morpheus and Neo in 1999. THE Matrix, a scene which she says led her to battle choreographer Woo Ping Yuen and the Hong Kong film world. She also cites Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman’s confrontation in Kill Bill Flight. 2where they ransack a caravan as they try to eliminate each other, and a scene in whack where a fight between Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender tears a hotel room to pieces.
“[Carano] has a real physicality that we often don’t see when women are cast as action heroes. They don’t always feel like they have the physical strength to do the things they do,” Manzoor says. “I was inspired by that. I wanted my actors to do as many stunts as they could themselves. I wanted them to fully embody those fight sequences and feel as true to the performer as possible. C was important to me.”
But the fight that really sparked the sister action for Manzoor came from Julia Ducournau’s cannibalistic horror drama. Raw. Genre-wise, the body-horror film is radically different from the coming-of-age comedy-action vibes of Polite companybut both films are about a pair of sisters and the brutality of RawManzoor’s sister fight really resonated.
“There’s a brilliant sister fight,” she says. “It’s kind of a horror version, but they’re biting each other – bleeding and biting each other. And I remember being like, Wow, I really feel seen by this incredibly violent fight. It gave me the power to go even further in my sister’s fight.
Polite company is in theaters now.
Add comment