Aisha
Aisha
In “Aisha,” Letitia Wright plays the young asylum seeker in Ireland seeking to defeat the bureaucratic system even if it means seeking assistance from the authorities that have caused her pain.
Writer-director Frank Berry’s film never devolves into the melodramatic – if anything, quite the opposite and it might even be too understated – the terrible situation she finds herself in has her emotions wracked with a very real cocktail of drudgery and happiness. The insanity of the constant difficulties she suffers through is infuriating: An administrator in the shelter she lives in refuses to give her an important mail item she needs, and so she is late for the bus bound for her part time work at a hair salon, where the manager shouted at her for coming late. Every single day. And she just cannot dare to relax. Some of these hurdles are influenced by racism and there is a degree of even masochism. Let us use, because it has been used for too long, for example, the explanation of the immigrants so cruelly treated by the United States – so that everyone will understand – the cruelty has its ultimate purpose.
That said, Aisha does not take ‘No’ for an answer from anyone. Wright who is hilarious and so strong in the ‘Black Panther’ films, uses that same fire in all the women, suggesting her character’s disappointment and sorrow through almost motion-less posture and clipped phrases.
The impressions formed early in the novel show the anguish she has gone through in order to leave her home country and also settle into a foreign country during the course of meetings with the immigration officer assigned to her case, Loran Crantich. However, it is easy to see why she chooses to avoid those memories with painstaking details. Wright provides information that helps in emotions engendering sympathy towards her to a little extent such that the heartless bureaucrats affecting her character will never be able to do.
Its not all doom and gloom however. There are early indications of how warm and effortless Aisha is with people in her bid to become a beautician – applying cosmetics on other women in the group home trying to make them smile, and managing to do so for a whole afternoon. Berry takes us through the daily highs and lows of Aisha’s life in convincing detail with the help of window shots and documentary style filming that is not intrusive. A view of Aisha is of a devoted Muslim woman, who like many others wakes up at dawn to begin the day with the first prayer, and these quiet moments spent praying seem to give her strength.
This observational style becomes even more important on one occasion when she wants to befriend Conor (Josh O’Connor) the new overnight host, who is one of the few genuinely kind people she has ever met.
Berry gives us the privilege of being quiet on their behalf, while most of the unspoken communication takes place over unhurried meals during the night in the factory’s kitchen, and their brief triads in the bus end up developing to gentle teasing and bickering.
O’Connor, who’s currently occupying the space in between two extremely different roles in Chakras and La Chimera, reveals another side of his talent around here. The bravado of those performances is gone. Driving away this point with an enormous doltish grin, Conor projects a slumping common man hurt over regret to repay his blunders of the old self. O’Connor is the kind of man who is talkative and funny so easily while Julian’s character is like the caged honey – sweet, but too little. For instance, the way how supportive Conor is towards Aisha bitterly makes you feel that he’s too good to be true, because he does it any time of the day, wherever she moves to once the system has her on a leash again. Still the question of whether they might be able to extend their friendly relations dangles over Aisha herself as well as over whether the latter would be able to stay in the country. At the end of the film though, the inability to socialize becomes more explicit, getting articulated visually by her sitting alone at a bus stop or by a small supermarket in towns.
Aisha, like many others, cannot find the simple solutions that she longs for – and as “Aisha” thoroughly illustrates – because they simply do not exist.
The conclusion of the movie was sudden and yet so real; still it might annoy a number of its audiences, and for this reason, it appears to imply something.
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- Genre: Drama, Romance
- Country: United States
- Director: Frank Berry
- Cast: Letitia Wright, Josh O'Connor, Lorcan Cranitch, Denis Conway, Stuart Graham, Ian Toner, Ruth McCabe, Pius Ojo
