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.

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