"Polite Society" and "The Artifice Girl"

Let's look at some recent, lower budget genre films today.

"Polite Society" is this year's "The Paper Dragons," as both films are about protagonists from Asian immigrant communities, and exploring identity and family ties through the lens of a kickass martial arts film.  Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) is a British-Pakistani teenager who wants to become a stuntwoman, but her traditional parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza) aren't so keen on the idea.  Her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) has recently left art school, and is now being pressured to marry and settle down - specifically with Salim (Akshay Khanna), the son of a family friend, Raheela (Nimra Bucha).

As wedding plans roll ahead and Ria's relationship with Lena becomes strained, Ria becomes desperate to stop the wedding.  She's just sure that Lena's future husband and mother in-law have nefarious motives for the match, and starts seeing the world like it's a grandiose martial arts film, where she must engage in one-on-one matches with opponents like the bully Kovacs (Shona Babayemi), and ultimately the rich and domineering Raheela.  Everything builds to a fantastic climax at the elaborate wedding, where Ria and her friends infiltrate the event and have a truly epic showdown.       

What I appreciate the most about "Polite Society" is that it's a ton of fun to watch.  Yes, it's enthusiastically a girl power film.  Yes, it was created by Nida Manzoor to showcase the British-Pakistani immigrant community.  However, it is a martial arts movie first, from Ria spending the whole film trying to perfect a special move, to the super-exaggerated stylization of the fight scenes.  Kansara showing off her moves while garbed in gorgeous wedding attire makes for some of the best visuals in the film.  It also doesn't skimp in the comedy department, with good natured, culturally specific ribbing of the Khans and their friends.  It's a slicker, sillier film than I was expecting, but definitely a nice surprise.

And now for something completely different.  "The Artifice Girl" is one of those microbudget science fiction films that is heavy on ideas and fairly minimalist in its filmmaking.  It reminds me of "Marjorie Prime," which explored these heady ideas about AI through a series of unhurried conversations between its characters.  "The Artifice Girl" gives us marginally more, but really boils down to three scenes of people talking in rooms, or over a screen.  One of them is an AI designed to look and behave like a eleven year-old girl, named Cherry (Tatum Matthews).   She was created to lure and identify sexual predators, but as Cherry grows and changes over the years, troubling ethical questions arise.

Written and directed by Franklin Ritch, who also plays the younger version of Cherry's creator Gareth, "The Artifice Girl" asks some probing questions about AI and its implications.  What makes it so effective is that the story takes its time humanizing Cherry.  The opening scene has Gareth being interrogated by a pair of law enforcement agents, Deena (Sinda Nichols) and Amos (David Girard), who have to be convinced that Cherry isn't a real girl.  Gareth demonstrates that Cherry can imitate a child, but behaves like a machine, talking in terms of objectives and protocols, coldly explaining her logical processes.  Tatum Matthews does an excellent job of conveying how Cherry fundamentally doesn't think the way a human being does.  But even after learning she's artificial, doubts remain.  Cherry may not be human, but she's self-aware and becomes moreso.

The final conversation of the film takes place between Cherry and an aged Gareth, now played by Lance Henrikson, who once also portrayed one of cinema's most famous artificial life forms.  It's here that the film's central themes really come into focus, and "The Artifice Girl" is revealed to be a parent/child story, and ultimately a hopeful one in spite of the dark subject matter.  The movie's production is very limited - it originated as a pandemic project, no surprise - but with clever editing and some discreet special effects, it doesn't feel low budget.  Because it's so unlike most studio produced science-fiction films, it feels more like television, and that's not a bad thing.  The melodrama is occasionally laid on pretty thick, but I strongly recommend this one for lovers of hard sci-fi and speculative fiction.     

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