Lay­la review – Bilal Has­na shines

Lay­la (Bilal Has­na) has been liv­ing a dou­ble life. As a non-bina­ry drag queen, they’re sur­round­ed by a queer artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty and reg­u­lar­ly per­form at the fic­tion­al Lon­don night­club Feath­ers. Yet in the pres­ence of their Mus­lim fam­i­ly, they abide by tra­di­tion and still go by their dead­name, Latif. When invit­ed to per­form at a cor­po­rate pride event for a ready meals com­pa­ny called Fork Me, Lay­la meets strait-laced mar­ket­ing exec Max (Louis Greatorex), who ends up join­ing them and their friends at a Feath­ers queer par­ty, kick­ing off their roman­tic fling.

Amrou Al-Kadhi’s debut trades in any unique qual­i­ties that a queer film can exhib­it in terms of form and con­tent, with the tried and test­ed for­mu­la of the palat­able, cheesy odd cou­ple romance. Here, it’s between the ​“eccen­tric” Arab non-bina­ry drag queen and the ​“con­ven­tion­al” white cor­po­rate gay man. It’s this glar­ing­ly harsh con­trast – between the vibrant and diverse queer scene in which Lay­la finds their com­mu­ni­ty, and the drab, cor­po­rate, mid­dle-class life of the straight-pass­ing Max – that ends up dri­ving the film for­ward; a some­what iron­ic bina­ry to rely on as a pri­ma­ry site of friction.

There is phe­nom­e­nal cin­e­matog­ra­phy and cos­tume design on dis­play, which come togeth­er to cre­ate a sump­tu­ous atmos­phere, but one that is sad­ly let down by a script large­ly shorn of the com­plex nuance behind all the ideas Al-Kha­di is try­ing to explore. In an attempt to con­sol­i­date con­flict­ing iden­ti­ties and com­mu­ni­ties, Layla’s jour­ney of iden­ti­ty with their rela­tion­ship to their fam­i­ly – as well as the added ele­ments of racial dynam­ics in queer rela­tion­ships and sub­tle trans­misog­y­ny microag­gres­sions – few of these ideas are afford­ed with the ade­quate space to be fleshed out, or to be emo­tion­al­ly explored with nuance. This feels true espe­cial­ly in the case of Layla’s fam­i­ly por­tray­al and their Pales­tin­ian back­ground, a thread estab­lished only in pass­ing and quick­ly dis­missed in favour of focus­ing on Layla’s strug­gle to nav­i­gate a new rela­tion­ship with a white man.

Bilal Has­na shines as Lay­la, deliv­er­ing a mag­net­ic per­for­mance, but unfor­tu­nate­ly the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who fall vic­tim to the con­trivances of a script that was maybe tak­en out of the oven before it was ful­ly cooked. Yet, despite the cheesi­ness and famil­iar sto­ry beats, there is plen­ty of ener­gy and heart behind this project, and its themes of trans­for­ma­tion, free­dom and authen­tic­i­ty are sure to resonate.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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