Before Nikkah (2025)

Both are getting a little hassle from their families to tie the knot so “Is” (Aakash Shukal) is getting the train to meet “Hana” (Sally Ann) at London’s Euston station for a day of inter-personal orientation. They don’t exactly get off to a flying start: both are nervous and quite possibly polar opposites as their day of tropes and traps unfolds before us. It seems written as if to exacerbate just about everything that could unite and divide people, using sloppy dialogue from the characters to allow one to score a point, or two, or three. She comes across as a bit arrogant and superior, he comes across as a bit of a chauvinist buffoon. Are either really like this, though? Well sadly some loose power cables mean his trains back are cancelled so we have to spend a great deal longer with these two uninterestingly introspective people who could just have easily walked to Victoria coach station and put him on a bus home way earlier. It makes so many assumptions about male and female as well as racial dynamics and after about ten minutes I really couldn’t have cared less whether they made any headway in their self-induced gloop of stereotypes and simplicity. To be fair, it is very difficult to present an audience with a continuous conversation. There have to be ebbs and flows in it’s intensity that allow us and the characters to come up for air but here even what passes for humour has a bitterness to it. The sarcasm is not about entertaining us, it’s about presenting a barbed sense of superiority that all too often takes refuge behind barriers of race, or colour, or sweeping generalisations. The production is basic hand-held stuff, looks as if the whole thing was filmed in a London remarkably devoid of bustle and though only ninety minutes long, it did feel quite a bit longer. Sorry, but I found this all just a bit too self-indulgent designed to preach to it’s already converted.