Nina's Heavenly Delights

If you ask me, the crux of the matter in _Nina's Heavenly Delights_ is revealed when Ms. Lady G's comments that the small battery-operated plastic Taj Mahal was a giant testament of grief. Parmar's film revolves around mourning and the comforts of beauty, love, aesthetics, family. And at the core of the film: is grief. Grief for her her father, yes, and also for the all that needs to be rewound: communication, home, deep friendship, solidarity, respect. If you've watched her documentaries over the years, you've found activist poetic diasporic politics running through, for her work is dutiful. But the films are always full of the other side of activism -- yearning -- and the other side of community -- grief. This film articulates those complicated emotions beautifully.

I find in this move to the feature film (which I applaud Kali films for with both hands clapping) a perfect topic: the loss of the father, the fall of queer idealism (we can't be gone for ever), and a return to the intricate and difficult subject of integrity and community integration. Less I sound too sophomoric to you, think again: Parmar and her crew are smart filmmakers: they've seen "Bend it Like Beckham" and "Fire" and many other important lesbian-type films ... and then delved into what drives us to love. No, Mia Hamm isn't in the limelight these days anyway, but more importantly didn't attempt the epic architectural overhaul of resovling the question of privacy and respect. Or, more poignantly, she and her writers did attempt the overhaul, but they did so in such subtle and lovely ways -- wouldn't you love for your future lover to discover something written behind the wallpaper? -- that the past becomes a sweet companion to the grief of the present. How is it possible to live without our memories? It is not. Patience is a virtue in this film, and I would love to hear your comments about mom and brother in light of such a topic as patience. I refuse to believe that honor is dead.

Shed Lacan -- _Nina's Heavenly Delights_ is not a typical, vacuous tale of lesbian and/ or progressive family who show their feathers when the big guy goes out. There seems, actually, to be a more important story going on about what shifts, and how we shift, through death, love and respect. To consider this a flat tale about "the law of the father" would be to belittle death and the dense process of mourning.

Quick last note: Three cheers for the best friend. Pratibha has finally given a body and character to her love of dance. Finally we can celebrate this with her.

I hate the way this film has been criticized in the press. By insisting, as the BBC does in their review of her film, that any treatment of Asian queerness needs to be portrayed as brutish and gritty, and that any story of an Asian family coping with a queer member must be shown through the lens of a "multicultural family and their troubled psyches", the press is putting the same straight-jacket on Asian filmmakers, as they do on black filmmakers, when they insist that the only stories that can come of out the black community are stories of gun violence and rat-infested squats.

The critics demand that queer Asians aren't allowed to do "Kissing Jessica Stein", that domain is reserved for whites only. Reading the reviews, you get the clear picture that the crime they want to charge Pratibha with, is not "making a bad film" but for "not telling an Asian queer story in the appropriate manner", as set out by films like East is East and My Beautiful Laundrette. That bloody sucks. More power to her for daring to challenge the stereotypes.

"Nina's Heavenly Delights" is actually more interesting for the milieu in which it's set - a community of Indian ex-pats living and thriving in Scotland - than for the story it has to tell.

Nina (Shelley Conn) moved to London a few years back to escape an arranged marriage to a man she knew she could never learn to love. When her father dies unexpectedly, Nina returns to Glascow to help run the Indian restaurant he's owned and operated for decades. Her partner in the endeavor is Lisa (Laura Fraser), a close friend of the family whom Nina finds herself falling in love with, a fact that may not sit too well with her traditionalist family.

"Nina's Heavenly Delights" is definitely a mixed-bag when it comes to virtues and flaws. It's at its best in its quieter, more serious moments, as Nina engages in thoughtful discussions with her family members and her new-found love interest. But when it aims for a more lighthearted tone, the movie tends towards the coy and the cloying. The coming-out aspects of the tale are handled with delicacy and restraint, though the determinedly upbeat ending is a trifle on the implausible and unconvincing side, to put it mildly. The movie also suffers from a surfeit of soulful montage sequences and irrelevant musical interludes, a holdover from its Bollywood roots, no doubt (the movie may be British in origin but its Indian influence is undeniable). Moreover, the blending of gourmet cooking with magical realism feels too reminiscent of "Like Water for Chocolate" for total comfort.

However, the performances are so authentic and the whole enterprise so well-meaning and upbeat that it's hard not to have positive feelings about the movie in the long run.

" I find some of the comments by ukxenafan1 quite insulting. I am Scottish and Asian and when I saw this film I identified with some of the characters on the screen. The actors' accents were authentic Scottish (some of the actors are actually Scottish) - not heavy Glasgow - and some of them talked in a way many Punjabi, Scottish people like myself talk. So for for this person to say that she/he didn't know what the accents were supposed to be is insulting to many Scottish- Asians who talk like the characters in the film. They should do their homework on the actors before they post such disrespectful comments. I went to see this film with friends in Glasgow and we all enjoyed it very much. We thought it was different to see a British-Asian film that didn't have the usual stereotypes that we have seen a thousand times before. Maybe this is why some people are having a problem with this film. There aren't many white people in the film and the Asian family is like any other family. We liked the magical elements of the film. Why should we expect all Brit/Asian films to be like the last one that was made. The girls in this film are not worshipping a white male god like Beckham. Thank god for that!

Great to see this kind of film out on general release in British cinemas and now on DVD. It's about time! One thing I would say is that if I were a sixteen year old girl or so, this would be my favourite film for a good while because of the 'girl-on-girl action'. But don't get me wrong this is definitely about women and not girls!

Well done Pratibha Parmar for bringing this fun-loving film, full of diversity of many kinds, out for all to see. I look forward to seeing more.

This film marks a time where more and more expressions of true love, identity and passion should be allowed onto the big screen for the mainstream to see. There are plenty of interesting works out there, which are simply not being allowed into the cinema for people to see because there is deemed to be 'no audience'. So pay attention to what you chose to see! It's people that determine what's out there and what isn't.