For one film named ”Unicorn“The color is noticeably absent at first. Luke (Ben Hardy) live in a world of gray, where cloudy sky and high blocks of concrete threaten to crush him completely. Also the responsibility for raising a five -year -old son alone after his ex quit. Not even a relaxed connection in a pounding field behind his Essex Council Estate liberates him from the narrow, limited feeling, especially when the woman he is just ragged cooling blows him.
That everything changes when Luke takes a wrong turn in an Indian restaurant one day and ends up in a Gaysian club night. After opening that door, the strobel lamps open his monochromatic existence with neon colors that pulsate and tinsel on the stage where Aysha (Jason Patel) performs. It’s almost like the unforgettable moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy’s world turns into color, except that there is no yellow brick road here. Instead, it is Luke who gets walled and looks at Aysha dance.
The couple will meet soon, each one that the other is, and it is not long before Aysha moves in for a kiss. It’s like a dream, too good to be true, until it turns out that the Apple of Luka’s eye actually has an Adam’s apple, which sends the whole world spinning.
Yes, Aysha is a drag queen, and when makeup goes off she goes by the name Ashiq. Luke is initially frightened, but he still says yes when Aysha contacts him a few days later and asks if he can drive her to gigs in exchange for money. It seems that they are both unwilling to release the first spark, and then a regular work arrangement that changes everything for Luke and Aysha begins as well.
Star -crossed love for this nature, queer or straight, as long as moving images have existed. But today, even the cultural specificity of this exact installation has become surprisingly familiar. Along Amrou al-Kadhi’s “Layla” and “Femme”, a thriller co -directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping“Unicorns” is, in fact, the third British film that struggles with romance between a white guy and a trainee of color over the past two years.
It’s not a bad thing. Nobody ever complained that there were too many straight white rom-coms, after all, and it should be the same for these films as well, because everyone has something very different to offer in the blurred lines of race, gender and sexuality they all explore. More romantic than “Layla” and milder than “femme”, “Unicorns” lies somewhere between the two in terms of its intensity, but there is still hope of being found and even some glitter in the middle of the dirty social realism in everything.
Author James Krishna Floyd collaborated with the film with Sally El HosainiThe who threw him like the star in her debut, “my brother The Devil,” Back 2012 with a story about a young gay Muslim drug dealer in Hackney. Combined with that experience, the expertise from Asifa Lahore, recognized as Britain’s first “out” Muslim drag queen, also comes as a consultant and executive producer at “Unicorns.”
This influence can be felt in Aysha’s world, especially if she dances after finished Muslim men in private house parties or counts on her own completed life at home. The community she lacks every time she goes back to visit her parents in Manchester is compensated by the selected family with which she surrounds herself in Essex, although forged rivalries mean that these queens are sometimes more competitive than sister.
The aforementioned “Layla” aside, it is rare to see sexual and gender fluidity is explored so freely and authentically through a South Asian lens in British film, even though there were at least 5 million people of South Asian origin living in the UK. It is therefore a shift towards Aysha’s personal life outside her romance with Luke is very welcome during the other half of “unicorns”, and helps to distinguish it by adding more weight to the script.
Of decisive importance, this does not mean that there is a third act descent in trauma. There are some more difficult edges, yes, but there is also a fairy tale shimmer for the film that softens them all the time, whether through the central romance or Aysha that finds joy in her femininity.
The newcomer Patel gives an open heart to the role of Aysha and dances between vulnerability and seductive magnetism with subtle changes in physics. Her performance scenes on stage are electric, which makes it easy to see why Luke fell so hard in the first place, but it is when Ashiq spends time with his biological family that the real performance kicks in. Hardy’s body language is everything up. You can feel Luke’s concrete concern with himself as he struggles to get a grip on this attraction and the love he feels about intervening prejudice. It is Hardy’s best performance so far, the type you hope will put him on the same track as comrades that George Mackay and Harris Dickinson have had in recent years.
What unites Aysha and Luke so beautiful is how – for all their differences – learn to trust their feelings and find comfort in each other. The chemistry that they share overcomes some of the script’s formula direction, reinforced by a camera that often remains at just the right moment and takes a glance or a smile that speaks to something deeper and more real.
For better or worse, it feels like there is more in this story beyond the credits, but at least two hours “unicorns” will help you escape the gray monotonin in life with style and color.
Rating: B.
“Unicorns” opens from Cohen Media Group in selected theaters on Friday 18 July.
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