Finding Fatimah Review

Finding Fatimah is a Muslim RomCom, from British Muslim TV and directed by Oz Arshad – and like American Sharia two years ago, debuted through a series of tours run by PennyAppeal (though, as a British Muslim film produced by British Muslim TV, a studio with close ties to PennyAppeal, the charity had more of a connection with it than with American Sharia).

After first hearing about the film through a casting call for extras (when it was then called Love Eventually – you decide which is worst) published on the charity’s Facebook page, to which I answered and was one of the extras in the film, I was keen to watch the final edit of the film to see if I was at all prominent in the film, which wasn’t impossible as I was sat next to Guz Khan, a member of the supporting cast, in the film. Unlike American Sharia, the film sadly didn’t tour in Newcastle, so I had to return to my hometown of Bradford and attend the viewing there. I was a volunteer at the showing, so I got in very early in the morning to help set up the venue, before greeting guests and helping with the fundraiser.

The film is Arshad’s directorial debut (and this is his first work of any prominence), which he also wrote. As far as IMDb can tell, this film is also the debut performance of Asmara Gabrielle, who plays Fatimah, while Danny Ashok, who plays Shahid, the lead male character, has done mostly TV work as a supporting character in episodes, as well as a minor character in Four Lions. The big names in the production are Nina Wadia of Eastenders fame, Shobna Gultai of Dinnerladies, Coronation Street and Eastenders fame, Muslim comedians Abdullah Afzal, Guz Khan and Imran Yusuf (who have all appeared on various BBC shows, with Afzal appearing as a recurring role on Citizen Khan), Denise Welch (Coronation Street, Waterloo Road, Loose Women), 8 Out of 10 Cats‘ Dave Spikey and The Office‘s Ewen MacIntosh.

So – how was the film? Painfully, it was quite terrible. There wasn’t enough in it for me to even be diplomatic about this. The dialogue was unrealistic, the characters inconsistent, the film bereft of much in the terms of humour and I am still completely baffled by the sound mixing in the film.

Lets start with the dialogue. It has no flow. It sounds more or less like someone took bullet points of what the dialogue should cover, and then independently wrote each line without any care of if it followed on naturally from what the previous line was. The actors with more experience did their best to carry it, but even the strength of their acting couldn’t cover the flaws. With the supporting cast and those with less acting experience, it showed painfully – right off the bat, Wahab Sheikh (who plays Shahid’s friend Nav) struggles to deliver his lines with any resemblance of how a real human speaks – Sheikh’s acting experience is as extras in films like RED 2 and Zero Dark Thirty, which hardly translates into then having to deliver comedic lines after comedic lines, making the first ‘skit’ of the film (where he and an Iranian woman argue in the road) awkward to watch (I will note that when not expected to perform comedically, Sheikh is less terrible, but still has to work with what the script gives him).

The poor dialogue reaches its apex in the scene where Shahid bumps into his ex-wfe at a car wash. They throw what I assume Arshad thought were witty insults at each other – but nothing what they say is a retort to what the other says – it’s just random dialogue. They could have been from two different scenes,

The characters themselves also are one of the film’s downfalls. The minor and supporting cast are depth-less characters that only exist to serve the plot. They are not fleshed out in the slightest, and a majority of the minor cast are stereotypes that aren’t even well executed as stereotypes. And what little characterisation we see is inconsistent – you have these scenes of apparent drama that only happen because previously mellow character decide they’re going to be angry for no apparent reason – which is promptly forgot about the following scenes. Any good in the characters I feel should be attributed to the actors, rather than any direction or merit in the script. The poor characterisation is even more of a problem because the film relies on them as much as it does the lead characters – there is a scene before the finale where Fatimah convinces her mother to support her decision to start a relationship with Shahid because the relationships of those around her (e.g. her mother and father’s, her sister’s and her husband, and someone who I think is her brother but I can’t tell because we never see him or the affects of his absence throughout the film except for two quick lines of dialogue) are terrible and she thinks she’s found someone who is unlike those. It doesn’t work as an emotional apex because we don’t care about these other characters. We barely see any of them (or at all, in the case of her brother) and their relationships and the affects of them are so flatly delivered they have no affect. The characterisation in the film breaks the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule throughout.

Most of the production value is pretty standard, with some nice use of VFX for pop-ups showing the characters’ dating usernames Sherlock-style, but where the production value is poor is the sound mixing. Oh God the sound mixing. According to IMDb credits, Anna Sulley is the SFX editor of the film, and she has a large list of credits to her name. The sound mixing was off throughout the film. Firstly for some bizarre reason, sounds that should have been coming from the left were coming from the right channel and vice versa. I spoke to the tech guy at the venue, who told me it was the sound mixing of the film (and then refused to swap the channels around to fix the problem for the audience, because apparently it wasn’t his responsibility to do so …). Throughout the film, foley noises were loud, so the soft click of someone closing a laptop sounded like he slammed it down with enough force to break it. The film also used weird musical sound effects (as in horror music) at certain times – I’m assuming for comedic affect but it just didn’t fit the the tone of the film, so it sounded out of place – it was only funny because it was bad.

So did the film have any saving graces. Actually, yes. The chemistry between Ashok and Gabrielle was actually good. So good in fact the dialogue in their scenes actually seemed to pass okay. Their scenes together were charming and you really got the feel that these were real people who had had problems in the past finding relationships and were glad they finally found someone they connected with. Unfortunately, scenes with the two characters together weren’t in the film enough, with the film, as I mentioned above, focusing more on the characters around the leads. It was like watching scenes from a much better movie. The film would have been much, much better had it focused on these characters much more throughout the film.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there was one good joke in the film. During one of the cutaways to Shahid’s stand-up performances, the joke ‘I ended up joining an EDL march and handing out their leaflets. Ironically that meant stealing one of their jobs.’ was hilarious. It was a nice, clever satirical joke in a film otherwise bereft of any humour. I did notice on the IMDb page that ‘additional stand-up material’ was written by someone else (Paul G. Raymond, who also has a minor role in the film), which probably explains that.

It pains me to have to be critical of this film. I really want Muslim cinema to succeed. I really want Islamic comedy to succeed. Muslims are one of the most under-represented minorities on screen, which is why I love the work British Muslim TV do, and have aspirations to apply there once I graduate. But it won’t succeed on the back of films like American Sharia and Finding Fatimah, which are apparently rushed into production without any thought or consideration. I really hope British Muslim TV decided to make another feature length film, but if they do, I really hope they put much more thought and consideration and attempt to execute it better.

On a final note, PennyAppeal, the charity which ran the film tour, do brilliant work supporting orphans and emergency crises over the world. Please visit their website and consider donating funds to help them feed starving families and build wells and school projects.