Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Brides’ Review: Nadia Fall’s Low-Key Study Of Teenage Alienation Humanizes The Touchy Subject Of Online Radicalization — Sundance Film Festival
America under Trump’s second presidency is fearful for its borders and the potential terrorists that might be coming in through them. Britain, under the comparatively liberal Keir Starmer, has a rather more niche anxiety: that its citizens will leave and then return as insurgents. This seemingly unlikely scenario played out in real life in 2015, when 15-year-old London schoolgirl Shamima Begum and two friends flew to Turkey and crossed the border into Syria, where they became jihadi brides and lived in misery. When she was found four years later, in a Northern Syrian refugee camp, Begum made news a second time, this time for being rendered stateless by the Conservative government.
Begum’s case is surely an unspoken factor behind playwright Nadia Fall’s feature debut. Scripted by Suhayla El-Bushra — whose time in the writers’ room on Nida Manzoor’s underrated We are Lady Parts, a British sitcom about an all-female Muslim punk band, is detectable in some of the film’s dry humor — Brides is a poignant and purposeful attempt to look behind the headlines.
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Tellingly, the drama (but, crucially, not the film), stops at the Syrian border, and though it is often contended that Begum and her friends were knowingly groomed by an intelligence officer, neither writer nor director are interested in excusing or playing down the enormity of the girls’ actions. Instead, Brides is a low-key study of teenage alienation, detailing a perfect storm in which burgeoning emotions and frustrations get frighteningly out of hand.
The setting is England 2014, and schoolgirl Doe (Ebada Hassan) is setting out from her suburban home at the break of dawn. Doe is especially careful not to make a noise as she navigates her way past the shoes left neatly in pairs on the stairs. Something seems off, and when she joins her friend Muna (Safiyya Ingar) on a commuter train, headed to one of London’s international airports, that sense of unease is compounded. The two girls are both Muslim but otherwise unalike; Doe, from Somalia, is quiet and thoughtful, while Muna, from a Pakistani family, is brash, impulsive, and, at times, troublingly aggressive.
Muna is leading the expedition, which the two girls treat like a school excursion, window-shopping in the duty-free shop and playing “f*ck-marry-kill” at a fast-food joint while waiting to board their flight to Istanbul. This ice cream, they joke, will be their last supper. “Gonna be lentils and rice after this,” notes Muna, naively speculating that the only candy at their destination will be halal Haribo. But though Muna appears to be in control, a mysterious contact has been laying the groundwork, arranging to meet the girls when they land. The contact, however, does not arrive, which ought to ring alarm bells. It doesn’t; instead, the girls press on with their crusade, booking a bus to a city near the Syrian border.
In the absence of the contact, Muna does a pretty good job of rescuing the mission, getting bullish whenever Doe shows signs of bailing (the first time occurs when a flood of text messages from her mother begin to arrive, starting with the heartbreakingly banal “Did you get the milk?”). A second red flag pops up when the girls have their money and their passports stolen. “Allah wants us to go home,” says Doe. “He’s testing us,” says Muna. Either way, Muna isn’t looking back. “Don’t call home until we get to the border,” she insists, presumably parroting the contact, “no matter how much it breaks your heart.”
As the two girls make their way to the border, it soon becomes clear that the destination is secondary to the journey, and, along the way, editor Fiona DeSouza goes above and beyond in her duties as the film zigzags between past and present, masterfully filling in the missing pieces of the jigsaw without sacrificing any sense of the overarching trajectory of the story. Racism plays a part on a micro and macro level here; Doe and Muna bond over the bullying they experience at school and home, but, on a global level, they also identify with the plight of their Muslim brothers and sisters, shown in harsh newsreel footage. But the subject of womanhood is also an issue, and the marginalization of women and girls in both Eastern and Western societies is a theme alluded to in the film’s irony-laden title.
Performance-wise, the leads are both excellent, although the more experienced Ingar does most of the heavy lifting, being the character who has to act as the catalyst for a story that would seem far-fetched if it hadn’t already happened. To those that have already made their mind up about migrants and Muslims, Fall’s film won’t make a jot of difference. But for those inclined to lean in, Brides is an admirable attempt to humanize a difficult subject and go some way towards humanizing the hot-button topic of online radicalization.
Title: Brides
Festival: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
Sales agent: Bankside Films
Director: Nadia Fall
Screenwriter: Suhayla El-Bushra
Cast: Ebada Hassan, Safiyya Ingar, Yusra Warsama, Cemre Ebuzziya, Aziz Capkurt
Running time: 1 hr 33 mins
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