Like mother, like daughter

It’s 1969, and Karachi is buzzing. Twentysomething Mariam is a fun-loving troublemaker who wears the shortest miniskirts, downs martinis at the hippest bars and confesses to cornering Paul McCartney at Karachi airport when the Beatles were on their first world tour. It seems impossible that this is the same woman who has been introduced in the opening scene of The Queen of My Dreams, set in 1999. Azra, a drama student in Toronto, is having a tense phone conversation with her mother in Nova Scotia. “It’s an MFA, mum – nobody calls it a ‘Mifa’”, Azra sighs with a twenty-year-old’s condescension. “I’m not nobody”, snaps her tired and disapproving mum – Mariam.

Fawzia Mirza’s debut film intertwines three timelines, in fact, charting a rocky mother-daughter relationship as well as the similarities between the two women from which that rockiness derives. (To drive the point home, Amrit Kaur plays both Azra and the younger Mariam.) In 1999, the film’s present day, tragedy befalls the family, necessitating a return to Pakistan; in Karachi, Azra and Mariam are compelled to confront their past and find a way, however imperfect, to make peace with one another. Through flashbacks Mirza implies that in order to do this two other formative relationships must be excavated: that between the young Mariam and her mother (Azra’s grandmother); and that between the middle-aged Mariam and a pre-teen Azra (Ayana Manji).

Mariam’s birth turns out to have been medically traumatic for her mother, making siblings impossible. Mirza nicely shows how Mariam is doted on, but also trapped in a co-dependent relationship. Whenever she expresses an interest in leaving Karachi (or in anything related to the wider world), she gets a prickly riposte in the form of an āyah from the Qur’an: “Heaven lies at the feet of your mother”. No wonder Mariam withholds the news that she and her fiancé, Hassan (Hamza Haq), plan to emigrate until after their engagement party. But the deception drives a rift between her and her mother for life.

The story of Mariam and the young Azra, meanwhile, reveals credibly the metamorphosis of a vivacious young woman into a devout, hypercritical mother. The first match is struck when Hassan suffers a heart attack. He survives, but Mariam becomes controlling and anxious, consumed by the idea that she can keep death at bay if she starts adhering to the five daily Islamic prayers. The second turning point is when she sees the twelve-year-old Azra share a kiss with a female classmate. Things are never quite the same between them again.

Mariam’s negative reaction is unfair. But the film succeeds here in conveying something more complex than the tired trope that insists on equating Islamic conservatism with “the East” and secular liberalism with “the West”. Historically, various Muslim communities – in the Ottoman Empire, pre-colonial West Africa and South Asia – had different conceptualizations of non-binary gender identities. In India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh today, hijras – often transgender or intersex individuals – enjoy legal recognition as a “third gender”. Indeed, a recurring character in the film’s 1969 timeline is Rani, a trans woman who occasionally parties with Mariam. Rani serves as a reminder that queerness was a visible presence in global southern societies well before the decriminalization of LGBTQ+ identities in most western countries. Mirza’s audience should understand that Mariam’s reaction to her daughter’s sexual identity is not a homophobia that can be explained away simplistically by her religion. It can also be seen, for one thing, as a response born of Mariam’s perceived loss of control after her husband’s health scare.

This speaks to a theme at the heart of The Queen of My Dreams, raising the question of what is lost and what is gained when we do that thing humans have always done: migrate. Born and raised in Canada, Azra is able to pursue her mother’s unrealized dream of an acting career. She is happy in her interracial lesbian relationship (passed off as a “roommate” to mum and dad, who seem to know the truth, but prefer a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach). Hassan and Mariam are quite the “model migrants” – a medical doctor and a stay-at-home mum who keeps the whole family ticking while jauntily selling Tupperware to her neighbours. Yet this is also a family living in isolation. Exchanging cosmopolitan Karachi for a sleepy town in Nova Scotia leaves them with no extended family or wider community to support them. All they have is one another; so the hardest feelings and the harshest words have nowhere to go but at each other.

This is a film that dramatizes poignantly the difference between the value western societies tend to place on individualism over communal ties (with its public social rituals, extended family affiliations and wider kinship networks) and the value of such communal ties over individualism in much of the global south, where important life events are understood to be trials difficult to tackle alone. In Pakistan, Azra at first bristles at the division of certain activities by gender. Ultimately, however, she is immersed in an extended family life dominated by interesting and intelligent female relatives who coddle, smother, cook, run errands and pray until her and Mariam’s grief is a dispersed and dulled thing. Migration can be freeing – until, one day, you need to be held.

With this subject matter it is easy to imagine The Queen of My Dreams as heavy going. But thanks to vivid cinematography, a transporting score, sprightly editing and some bright comedic performances, Mirza has achieved the opposite. Pakistan’s unique culture, so often subsumed into the cultural juggernaut that is India, gets some much-deserved screen time here, from the spiritual force of its qawwali music to its head-spinning urban pace. The interpersonal drama is played out against Wes Anderson-esque colour tones and there is something mischievous in the pacing of the story that keeps the viewer interested.

Bollywood does put in an appearance here in the form of a musical refrain: “Meri Sapno Ki Rani”, the titular “Queen of My Dreams”, from the Indian Hindi romantic drama Aradhana (1969). This is Mariam’s favourite film, and singing along to it with her mother becomes one of Azra’s formative childhood memories. Both of them lapse into daydreams in which they take the place of the film’s star, Sharmila Tagore. This is a playful way of aligning them without eliding the differences between the generations.

Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City, University of London

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