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DINARD 2024

Review: Unicorns

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- Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd’s Dinard winner is a sweet, if rather predictable, love story about embracing difference and getting over prejudice

Review: Unicorns
Jason Patel in Unicorns

The big winner of the 35th Dinard British and Irish Film Festival (see the news), Unicorns, was co-directed by Sally El Hosaini (My Brother the Devil [+see also:
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, The Swimmers [+see also:
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) and actor James Krishna Floyd, the latter of whom also wrote this sweet-natured romantic comedy. When young, white, single father and mechanic Luke (Ben Hardy) stumbles into a London nightclub by complete chance, he doesn’t expect his understanding of his own identity to be challenged. Commanding the stage and his rapt attention is Aysha (Jason Patel, full of energy and charisma), a South Asian performer, and they meet outside after her Indian-inspired and heavily sexualised dance show. Their chemistry is raw and evident, but Luke puts a sudden end to proceedings when he finally understands that Aysha is a drag queen and thus, biologically speaking, a man. Aysha is hurt but also surprised that Luke hadn’t realised, and the filmmakers soon make sure to establish that Luke’s homophobia is only of the internalised kind and doesn’t translate into violence, a reassuring if perhaps slightly convenient and optimistic plot development. He just doesn’t swing that way, he thinks.

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Despite this slight idealism, Unicorns clearly intends to represent the unglamorous and, at times, dangerous reality of life in London for queer artists, as well as its precariousness for the working class. Desperate for cash and a modicum of safety, Aysha finds Luke again to ask him to become her driver in exchange for a share of the profits she makes dancing. In need of money to keep his promise to take his son to Disneyland, Luke accepts, but Hardy’s tender performance makes it evident that the young man also wouldn’t mind getting to know Aysha better, despite his anxiety. If the film’s focus on the particular kind of oppression that queer South Asian people suffer is sadly too rare in cinema, its narrative progression is conventional and unadventurous, following the well-worn path of the romantic comedy with more emphasis on the romance than the comedy. The direction and cinematography don’t add much weight to the material either, with the filmmakers falling back on classic and overdone techniques to communicate their clichéd ideas, such as switching to slow motion every time Luke, speechless, watches Aysha dance. Paradoxically, the film’s striving for realism also sometimes tips it into unsensitive territory, as though it were not only tugging at our heartstrings, but pulling on them to breaking point. If the film’s romance is almost rose-tinted, its insertion of shocking violence for the sake of realism often feels cynical.

Unicorns becomes more intriguing when Aysha is forced to return home to her very conventional Indian family in Manchester and cede the stage to Ashik, her original male identity. Patel’s performance becomes subdued as Aysha’s exuberance is replaced by Ashik’s fear and deep loneliness. That inability to be one’s true self around our loved ones, a pain that one often carries forever, is much more devastating than the gritty violence that seems to befall Luke and Aysha always at their happiest moments, a timing that aims to generate extra pathos but only feels forced and unnecessarily bleak.

Unicorns is a UK-US-Swedish co-production staged by Maven Screen Media, River Road Entertainment and Chromatic Aberration. Its international sales are handled by Protagonist Pictures, and the UK and Irish releases earlier this year were handled by Signature Entertainment.

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