Nida Manzoor shoots small feelings at the scale the person feeling them would choose: a schoolgirl grudge as a western, a shy woman's bedroom as a punk gig. It is a rare gift in British comedy, and she has not yet found an ending worthy of it.
Fi1m perspective
In Polite Society (2023) two schoolgirls square up in a corridor over nothing very much, and Nida Manzoor films it as a duel: whip pans, a slow zoom into narrowed eyes, a title card slapping down over a frozen face. That is her habit, and it is the best thing about her. She takes a small, silly, private feeling, a grudge, a crush on a guitar, a sister's engagement, and shoots it exactly as seriously as the person feeling it does and not a bit more. She never winks. The film is on the character's side entirely, and the joke never turns on them.
She came up through television: a production runner, shorts from 2013, scripts for CBBC, episodes of Enterprice (2017–18) and two of Doctor Who in 2020. Then came We Are Lady Parts (2021), six episodes about an all-female Muslim punk band who cannot find a lead guitarist, which she created, wrote and directed. It is quick, rude and warm, and Anjana Vasan carries it without strain. Polite Society followed two years later, her first film, and for an hour it is nearly as good. Then the last act arrives, louder and stranger, and loses the two sisters who were the point.
The songs are hers. Her siblings Shez and Sanya Manzoor write the music with her, and the numbers in Lady Parts are proper three-minute punk songs with jokes in them, played loud and slightly ragged, the way a real band in a small room sounds. She has said she wanted to be "a brown girl Bob Dylan before I wanted to do screenwriting", and it shows: the best sequence in Polite Society is not a fight but a dance, Ria performing Maar Dala at an engagement party with the fixed smile of someone planning a crime. Robbie Morrison has cut both projects for her, fast, letting a daydream land as a gag and get out. Diana Olifirova on the series and Ashley Connor on the film both lit her mock-serious frames dead straight, which is why they are funny. Ritu Arya turns up in both.
What does not work yet is the finish. She is a director of rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and rehearsal spaces, and both her big pieces are weakest when they leave them. The men in Lady Parts are barely there. The last half hour of Polite Society borrows from Bond, horror and heist, does each capably, and none of it is hers the way the kitchen scenes are. We sat through it waiting for the film to come back to the two women at the table, and we minded the wait more than we expected, because the first hour had been as much fun as we have had at a British comedy in a while.
A second series of Lady Parts has been ordered and more is in development. If she asked us, and she will not, we would tell her to keep the fights small. The corridor duel is funnier than anything in her last act, and we suspect she knows it.
Biography
Nida Manzoor is a British screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film Polite Society (2023).
Manzoor created, wrote and directed the Channel 4 and Peacock series We Are Lady Parts (2021–2024). She won the 2021 Rose d'Or Emerging Talent Award and the 2022 BAFTA Television Award for comedy writing for the series. She directed the Doctor Who episodes "Fugitive of the Judoon" and "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror" (both 2020).
Born in London in September 1989, Manzoor began her career directing episodes of the sitcom Enterprice (2017–2018) and several short films.
