The Queen Of My Dreams review – excep­tion­al­ly pleasant

The 1969 Bol­ly­wood romance Arad­hana sits at the heart of Fawzia Mirza’s charm­ing moth­er-daugh­ter dra­ma set in late 90s Cana­da, The Queen of My Dreams. The film is ref­er­enced through­out this debut, Arad­hana fol­low­ing a young woman who com­mits all of her­self to her fam­i­ly and explores the heart-wrench­ing sac­ri­fices a moth­er makes for the next generation.

Mari­am (Nim­ra Bucha) is the weary, con­ser­v­a­tive Mus­lim moth­er of queer, aspir­ing actor, Azra (Amrit Kaur). Despite both Azra and Mari­am obses­sive­ly watch­ing Arad­hana through­out their lives, the for­mer fails to heed the mes­sages of mater­nal strug­gle which run so deeply through­out, hav­ing very lit­tle (if any) sym­pa­thy for her devot­ed moth­er. Even when Azra’s father Has­san (Hamza Haq) sud­den­ly dies on a trip home to Pak­istan, moth­er and daugh­ter con­tin­ue to bick­er, with Azra see­ing lit­tle point in the tra­di­tions and rit­u­als Mari­am holds so close to her.

The Queen of My Dreams tack­les the inevitable, yet trau­mat­ic, real­i­sa­tion that our moth­ers are in fact, humans too. It does this by allow­ing us to trav­el back on a Bol­ly­wood-inspired jour­ney through Mariam’s rebel­lious youth in Karachi, which is coun­ter­point­ed by Azra’s child­hood in rur­al Cana­da. Both women’s grief is then giv­en a plau­si­ble emo­tion­al context.

Dur­ing Mariam’s flash­back we meet a hedo­nis­tic young woman enjoy­ing life to its fullest – a stark con­trast to the tra­di­tion­al, Tup­per­ware-obsessed moth­er we encounter in 1999. As a young woman Mari­am drinks, dances and flirts her way through life, and these styl­ish scenes full of ​’60s glam­our and Beat­le­ma­nia are some of the film’s best. We see Mari­am fall mad­ly in love with Has­san, trans­form­ing their love into a cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle in her mind, sim­i­lar to the fan­tas­ti­cal sequences seen in Aradhana.

The time-jump­ing nar­ra­tive, how­ev­er, isn’t root­ed in Azra delv­ing into her mother’s past, or Mariam’s nos­tal­gia for her own. The dif­fer­ent time­lines instead cre­ate a reveal­ing col­lage of both women’s respec­tive com­ing-of-ages and how their indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences shape their rela­tion­ship to them­selves and one anoth­er. Although ten­der, it all ends up feel­ing a lit­tle dis­joint­ed. We appear in a spe­cif­ic mem­o­ry with­out cause, only to leap abrupt­ly back into the present and are left with a tinge of whiplash.

The con­cept of pit­ting tra­di­tion­al ver­sus pro­gres­sive atti­tudes in fam­i­lies has become a time­worn cin­e­mat­ic trope, but it’s still done well here. What lifts Mirza’s film above the pack is that it is alive with colour and music, her char­ac­ters are endear­ing and, while a lit­tle frag­ment­ed towards the end, the writer/​director at least makes sure it’s a plea­sure to reach that point.

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

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.