Review: Stir yourself — I am Nasrine is far from an Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who flees her home country for one of those better lives that could well turn out worse, it’s not what I would call An Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter. Instead, it is affectionate, humane, tender and, ultimately, optimistic. So stir yourself, and prove I am right, for once in my life.

The film opens in modern-day Tehran — where, I now know, Gharavi had to film secretly — with Nasrine, as played by Micsha Sadeghi,  who has one of those blissful faces that may or may not be beautiful, and it doesn’t matter. All you need know is it’s a face that unfolds gently, in different ways, and is the kind of face you could watch all day every day. (I do not have such a face, I believe.) Nasrine, we are given to understand, is something of a rebellious free spirit, and after a run-in with the police and awful ordeal at the police station — she had been arrested for riding on the back of a boy’s moped, while wearing a bold orange head scarf — her stern father decides to send her and brother Ali (Shiraz Haq) to the UK for ‘education and opportunity’.They make the journey illegally, in the back of a truck, and are, in film time, swiftly in Newcastle. Unlike Tehran, which had been bustling and vivid and, from the looks of it, hot, Newcastle is washed-out and
overcast and drizzly and all hard concrete, in that way post-industrial cities are. But there will be beauty here, too, of a kind.

Put through the asylum system, and told they can’t work legally, but can attend a place of education, Nasrine starts going to school while Ali finds illegal employment in a car-wash and fast-food joint. They are awarded a home, in a high-rise, on a council estate. Nasrine soon makes a friend, Nichole, who is from a family of travellers — a real family of travellers, not actors, I now know — and who gets herself to school by horse and cart. The family accepts Nasrine warmly, without question, while Nasrine falls for the horses. And there is such visual beauty in the equine imagery, as the horses clip-clop against all that hard concrete, and as Nasrine strokes their flanks, and even learns to ride in a country where you can ride what you like, and not get hoiked away by the police. Oh, this is going to be horrible, you had thought, when the siblings had first arrived. They are going to be harassed and spat at and I’m going to feel ashamed to feel British. But Gharavi’s love for Newcastle and its citizens and the way people can and do reach out to each other is actually what propels this film.

Yes, there is trouble ahead. Ali is struggling with his sexuality. And it’s 2001, so along comes 9/11. In fact, this touches on everything — asylum, homosexuality, travellers, immigrants, terrorism — that makes the Daily Mail froth at the mouth, suck the  spit back in, and froth again. (It can, apparently, do this over and over, without ever tiring.) But only tangentially. Sensibly, Gharavi makes this Nasrine’s story, and focuses tightly on her soul as it journeys to the kind of freedom she has always longed for, and is willing to pay a price for, whatever that price may be. True, not all of this adds up all the time. I’m guessing Nasrine is meant to be around 16, but she looks substantially older. And in the end, when she makes a decision, the most important decision she will ever probably make, I did ask myself: hang on, is that actually her decision to make? But it’s still tender and beautiful and affectionate and gentle and moving. So stir yourself.