Unraveling Mother-Daughter Dynamics in 'The Queen Of My Dreams'
How much do you know about your mom?
This review is part of the SXSW 2024 coverage on Hi Shelli!
Imitation of Life (1959) is one of my mama’s favorite films. Every time it came on TCM she’d sit in the cozy chair in her office and watch. She loved film as much as I did. Often telling me how she’d watch movies with folks like Cyd Charisse, Ginger Rogers, and The Nicholas Brothers and dream of dancing on stage and screen.
My bedroom was right next to her office so oftentimes, our volume would be competing. I’d either come out and ask her (with the attitude of a pre-teen) to turn her TV down or join her in what she was watching. There are a few times I remember being splayed out on the cranberry-colored carpet my father had installed for her, with a ruffled pillow tucked underneath me watching a film with her.
Imitation of Life tells the story of a mother and daughter and follows the sorta, dissolution of their relationship which is loaded with issues like rejection, self-hatred, and embarrassment. Films that show mother-daughter relationships often hit me hard, especially when it’s with folks of color. Eve’s Bayou, Soul Food, and Crooklyn are some favs and recently some with a queer element have made it to the list. The Persian Version, which I saw last year and dug, and now The Queen of My Dreams.
It’s written and directed by Fawzia Mirza of Signature Move and The Syed Family Xmas Game Night fame. After the sudden death of her father in 1999, Azra (Amrit Kaur, The Sex Lives of College Girls) flies to Pakistan where he is being buried. While there her mother Mariam (Nimra Bucha, Polite Society) expects her to put everything aside (her queer identity, her rejection of certain traditions, and their strained relationship) to be the perfect grieving daughter.
Of course, Azra doesn’t do that. How she moves in her grief only triggers more feelings in herself and her mother. They don’t know each other, and for one of them, it feels purposeful.
They do have a connector though, a shared love of the film, Aradhana. Mariam showed it to Azra when she was younger and it stuck with her for her whole life. But shortly after her happy introduction to the film is the start of their crumbling relationship. They are both witness to something that happens in the life of the other that spurs its change. They become separate from each other and from that point on drift further apart. Their distance is still present even as they mourn the death of Azra’s father.
My mother is a big part of why I am an artist. I don’t write about her much, but she has never tried to stop my creativity. Art is our connector, not just because we both lived through movies in our youth, but because my mother too is an artist, a dancer. She once had an opportunity of a lifetime snatched away from her by her mother, and it led to their relationship being more fraught than it already was. Over the years, my mother and I have had our issues—not speaking for months at a time, arguments over my autonomy, and how she could no longer speak to me certain ways in my adulthood—but it was never headed to being irrevocably broken. The story of her relationship with her mother was told to me in pieces over the years, sort of spilling out whenever we’d make up from a fight of our own.
I know that mothers of millennials (Baby Boomers) don’t share much about their past with their children. In the film, Azra is Gen X, so her mother belonged to The Silent Generation which means she shared even less. Her family in Pakistan are the people who slyly let her know that her mother wasn’t always the stern, conservative, and distant woman she is today.
We get to know them both through flashbacks, mostly to Mariam in a technicolor 1969 Karachi. Mariam (the younger version was also played by Amrit Kaur) was youthful, lively, and went against the expectations set for her by society. They aren’t as different as they think they are, but the history of their relationship—and now their grief—won’t let them see that.
Grief is often a catalyst, it will bring up buried emotions even if you don’t want it to. It can also remind you how short life is and encourage you to move forward and forgive. Fawzia uses grief and flashbacks (with some transitions mimicking a carousel slide projector of the late 1960s which is so dope) to highlight the similarities between Azra and Mariam.
As I watched, I felt at times that the flashbacks were getting us further away from their reconciliation. As viewers, through the flashbacks, we are racking up reasons why their relationship has every chance at healing. But we spend so much time in the past, that we rarely get to visit them in the present and allow them to talk about, or even share, this newly learned history with each other.
If they did, they would be able to use their history to explain the layers of hurt and misunderstanding that have created their current dynamic. With each jump to the past, a new piece of the puzzle falls into place for the viewer but not for Azra and Mariam on the screen. However, through Mirza's storytelling, you’re reminded that while the past may shape major parts of us, there is always space to change.
There is this Instagram post I have saved that says “Normalize changing your opinion when presented with new information.” In my mind, if Azra and Mariam can share all the parts from their pasts that we get to see in the flashbacks, they can work towards a new relationship with one another. As we age, mothers and daughters (and children/parents in general) often forget to treat each other like humans. For some reason, it’s hard to set aside the nature of our relationship and remember that this is just another human being who will have many a flaw.
The story in The Queen of My Dreams will be a familiar one to many women who watch. It highlights how closely linked communication and understanding is. I really do feel like in the story of mothers and daughters, Gen Z daughters will have it best. Being raised by a generation of queer mothers who are hyper-traumatized and are therefore over-therapized and extra intentional about breaking generational traumas.
Perhaps I’m too hopeful, maybe I’m extra excited to build a bond based on kindness, respect, compassion, and acceptance—or maybe I’m part of a group of future parents who feel the same way.
In the future, in the moments that I fall short as a mother, maybe I’ll pause and pop in a film. I’ll give my future kid control of the volume, and possibly—for that moment—we can just connect through the story being told on the screen.
Extras:
Queer interracial romance is present again in this film….I’m still begging for QTPOC folks on film to not have this as the norm.
Aradhana is a real film and the song in it, Mere Sapno Ki Rani, translates to The Queen of My Dreams.
Also, the actor in Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna, plays double roles in the film and Amrit Kaur plays double roles in The Queen of My Dreams.
I LOVE when movies do shit like this.
Here is a comprehensive list of my favorite Bollywood films IN ORDER:
SOUNDTRACK IS UNMATCHED BITCH
My mother is obsessed with Youtube because she can watch clips of all her fav dancing moments in film on the go…it’s fucking cute. She’s watching a clip of The Nicholas Brothers in Stormy Weather in this pic.
Slight Spoilers:
Pay attention to what Azra’s girlfriend waters the plants with.
The talk of complexion was dope. Glad that they put in to hit on how that has been happening for like…ever.
If you fucked with this piece, you might really dig this one:
Grey Gardens
A few weeks ago I went home for I think, maybe 36 hours. Home is Detroit. My uncle died, it was both surprising and not. Suprising ‘cos only a few weeks before did he have an incident that sent him to the hospital, but not surprising ‘cos that incident was pretty wild and his recovery from it was in steady decline. They found him in our family home, the home that was passed down to him by my paternal grandparents, the home that my dad and his siblings grew up in, and the home I remember visiting from my childhood.
Thank you so much for reading Hi Shelli! As always, all reviews are in front of the paywall but if you like what you read I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber <3
OMG girl the chokehold that 90’s shah rukh khan movies have must be studied (I recommend Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Om Shanti Om)