The Queen of My Dreams: Mother-Daughter Conflict Reigns Across Eras and Cultures
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
There is a joyful lightness of spirit — and some very beautiful cinematography — in The Queen of My Dreams, the dazzling debut feature from Canadian writer-director Fawzia Mirza which premiered last fall at TIFF.
At its essence, the film is a mother-daughter story told through the lens of two cultures spanning four decades. But really, The Queen of My Dreams is about love in its many forms and how, in the end, it ultimately dwarfs our differences.
When we meet Azra in Toronto in 1999, she is living covertly with her lover Rachel and studying for an MFA. From the start, it’s clear Bollywood films in general and star Sharmila Tagore in particular cast major influence over aspiring actor Azra while connecting her to her mother Mariam, who is preparing a return visit to her native Pakistan with husband Hassan.
Once there, Hassan dies unexpectedly. Azra and brother Zahid are summoned to Karachi for the funeral where something akin to culture shock develops for the young woman whose childhood in Nova Scotia hasn’t prepared her for old school ways despite being a quasi-observant Muslim.
The film shadows Azra as she comes to grips with her square-peg reality in Pakistan amid the patriarchal funeral proceedings. From there, it skips back in time to 1969 where Mariam, at about Azra’s age, finds her own feet while being courted by the dashing, Canada-bound Hassan.
The conceit of The Queen of My Dreams, and it’s a winning one, is that actor Amrit Kaur plays both Azra and Mariam as young adults, with the two inhabiting wildly different worlds that underscore both their similarities and variations. (You can always tell who’s who; Azra is plain-faced and dressed down where Mariam is in full makeup and kitted out in skirts).
The film, with dialogue in English and Urdu, offers Bollywood-inspired set pieces, fabulous costumes, and superb location shots. (It was filmed in Nova Scotia and the Sindh province of Pakistan). There’s also genuine comedy amid the family-fuelled drama.
One scene in the film’s final third, set in 1989 Nova Scotia, finds 12-year-old Azra banished to the hallway along with a Jehovah’s Witness kid during a Bible study class at school. Their religious comparisons are sterling.
Similarly, in Nova Scotia, Mariam’s efforts to sell Tupperware to the neighbourhood ladies over chai tea, sometimes with awkward tween Azra assisting, offers a gently comic view of the intricacies of assimilation.
The Queen of My Dreams falls a bit short in convincingly connecting the dots between Mariam’s free-spirited youth in Karachi and the rigidly conservative woman we meet years later. The young Mariam — who slyly window-dressed a love match with Hassan as a traditional match for the sake of her parents — surely would have at least empathized with her daughter’s fierce resistance to tradition.
Still, everything about the film is conveyed with such warmth — and music and dancing and fabulous blazes of colour.
Mirza has coaxed committed, sincere performances from her ace cast, giving them dialogue that feels just right. In a word, delightful.
The Queen of My Dreams. Written and directed by Fawzia Mirza. Starring Amrit Kaur, Nimra Bucha, Hamza Haq, Ayana Manji, Gul-e-Rana, Ali A. Kazmi, and Meher Jaffri. In theatres March 22.