Mitu Misra’s rough-and-ready, Bradford-set debut is, to its credit, attempting something innovative. The film sets itself up as a crime thriller about a driver, Donald (Gabriel Byrne), who must conceal the evidence of his deceased boss’s (Harvey Keitel) Muslim mistress. However, the story pivots around Amber (Sibylla Deen), a young, beautiful Pakistani lawyer who lives with her parents, wears a hijab, and drinks white wine with older men in her downtime – as proved by incriminating camera-phone footage of her in a negligee, pinot grigio in hand. Amber has to manage the potential fallout while juggling the everyday expectations of her community and the impending marriage of her younger sister to Amber’s dangerous ex-husband, KD (who also happens to be her cousin). “When are you going to stop judging us by British standards?” berates her mother.
The film is hindered by clunky dialogue and strained performances from minor characters, though there’s something to be said for Amber, a modern, multifaceted Muslim female. Deen inhabits all of her contradictions, with Byrne a welcome fatherly foil. Frustrating, then, that the film is too cynical (or simply not confident enough) to create a conclusion befitting its heroine, ending instead with the sort of stock grand finale that has come to characterise movies about the “oppression” of Muslim women.
