User reviews

Signature Move was well-received at its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. It is a beautiful film. As the director alluded to in her introduction, the film is a lesbian love story between a Pakistan- American Muslim immigration lawyer and Mexican-American bookstore owner in a peaceful diverse Chicago. Basically, it is about everything Donald Trump hates! More seriously, it is about a diverse multicultural melting pot where people of different cultures come together and learn from each other and grow and sometimes come to love each other. The film is well-acted and the script is quite subtle. I particularly enjoyed the performances of Fawzia Mizra as Zaynab and Shabbana Azmi as her mother. The family relationship as Zaynab gradually figures out how to share her true self with her traditional mother is compelling. There are parts of the story that are a little too predictable, but basically it very enjoyable and a great anecdote to today's mean-spirited political climate.

It is a really funny and relaxing film. It really make me laugh. And especially love the mom part, which introduced the conflicts between old immigrants and the new elements. It make people reflect these serious topic in the laughters. Nice work! Also Shabana Azim and Fawzia Mirza really interpreted their roles perfectly!

Signature Move (2017) was directed by Jennifer Reeder. It's a pleasant enough lesbian love story. What makes it somewhat unusual is that the two lovers come from very different cultures.

Fawzia Mirza portrays Zaynab, a very successful immigration lawyer, who lives with her mother, Parveen, played very well by Shabana Azmi .

Sari Sanchez portrays Alma, a woman who lives within Chicago's Mexican-American culture. Sari's mother is a wrestling coach. Zaynab begins to take wrestling lessons. The remainder of the film is based upon the chemistry between Zaynab and Alma and Zaynab and wrestling.

The publicity for the films warns us that Parveen's quest for a husband for her daughter isn't played stereotypically. (If the publicity warns you that something isn't so, it usually means something is so.) Parveen is so eager to find a husband for her daughter that she searches the street with binoculars. (Looks stereotypic to me.) However, Shabana Azmi is so skilled that we can enjoy her acting, even if the part she's given isn't realistic. Both Fawzia Mirsa and Sari Sanchez are fine actors as well, so the movie is strengthened by the strong acting of the leads.

We saw this film in Rochester's excellent Little Theatre. It was shown as part of the wonderful ImageOut, the Rochester LGBT Film Festival. It will work well on the small screen, and is worth seeking out and watching.

This is a new queer classic! I loved everything about this movie. It was funny, and sweet, and just awesome! Can't wait to see more from the folks who made it, we need more uplifting tales like this!

Signature Move screened at the 2017 Vancouver Queer Film Festival (August 10-20) and is billed as an indie comedy-drama, but the film's writer and leading actress Fawzia Mirza, who attended the screening, called it a "romantic comedy Muslim melodrama." The film's protagonist, Zaynab (a Pakistani woman living in Chicago) starts seeing Alma (a bright, exuberant Chicana woman). Zaynab's relationship with Alma stumbles along in fits and starts: the next time she sees Alma after their first drunken hook-up, Alma realizes that Zaynab doesn't remember her name, and Zaynab says, "Gimme five to choose from." After being given five options, she picks wrong. A client of Zaynab's can't afford to pay her for her services as an immigration lawyer and asks if she accepts "other forms of payment," which means wrestling coaching, and she ends up training for a ladies luchador match. Meanwhile, her mother watches the world through binoculars from her living room armchair and tries to find a suitable husband for Zaynab; she tells her that she can go to the gym, but says, "Don't do too many crunches. You want to marry a man, not look like one."

The concept of "coming out"-an individual announcing their homosexuality to their loved ones and the world as a whole-is inherently flawed. Gay folks decide whether to disclose their sexuality every day: when a cashier asks what they're up to that weekend, when friends ask who they're seeing and, of course, when their parents ask to meet their "friend." The idea of being out once and for all, as if it's a band-aid to be ripped off, is an impossible ideal, and an inherently white, Eurocentric one, too. In Signature Move, Zaynab is not out, and Alma is. This causes tension as their relationship grows and the film uses sights, sounds and well-timed cuts to strike a dichotomy between the two halves of Zaynab's life and the growing chasm that separates them. The way that the film deals with this makes it infinitely more nuanced than your standard East-meets-West romantic comedy, as it questions the tropes we've come to expect from films starring mixed race leads, where South Asian culture is seen as oppressive and backwards and Western culture as enlightened and forward-thinking.

Zaynab is closeted, but as Mirza herself said in an extremely charming Q&A after the show, the point of the film is not to present Alma's way of life as more correct than Zaynab's. It's the opposite. "We have to let go of thinking that there's one right way to be," Mirza told the audience in a discussion about the white, Western concept of coming out, and her own experiences with her mother. "It's about finding better words and language to talk about the gay experience."

On another note: Signature Move not only finds better language to talk about ethnocentrism and coming out, but to portray the lesbianism as a whole. It lets vibrant, lesbian womanhood exist in a way that often gets polished away for straight audiences-it's sweaty, awkward, funny and unapologetic. Even if you're not interested in the film for its aforementioned contributions to queer South Asian cinema, watch it because it's extremely well made. It's full of the little things that happen in real life: how your hair gets messed up as you get progressively more drunk, how your lips smush up when you kiss. Zaynab's mother has a band-aid on her thumb for most of the film. The set design is detailed and expressive, especially the bedrooms, packed with trinkets and posters. Zaynab's apartment is always filled with the sound of her mother's Pakistani television dramas, which creates a tangible feeling of home. This film was the one I was most excited to see at this year's VQFF, and I can't recommend it enough. It's one of those films you want to thank for existing.

This movie has a 100% On Rotten Tomatoes and an 89% audience score, so this poor rating here does not reflect how good the film actually is. One fairly unhinged review on this movie is tanking the IMDb score unfairly and that's so annoying cause this movie deserves every award it won and then some.

I was suspended by how much I liked this film. It was heartwarming and enjoyable to watch. I think 89% is the perfect score for it.

I think it's biggest (only?) fault is the Lucha plot feels shoe horned in. I feel like Lucha Libre wasn't really given the respect it deserved and served as little more than a quirky plot device. I would be absolutely floored to find out anyone in the cast/writing team actually knows much about Lucha.

Otherwise this was a really great film and definitely worth a watch.

Interesting film, with great characters.

It has great representation for the LGB community.

It was good to see the dynamics of family life being tied in with this. Alongside bringing in two different cultures, and some back story of them across generations.

The wrestling was also awesome 👌.

I loved the mum and her binoculars too.

At the end we could have seen a little more about the mother - daughter relationship between the main character and her mother and how that develops.

Overall quite a heart warming film.

I loved the ending, with the main characters "signature" move, it was the perfect way to end the film.