Director Jennifer Reeder’s “Signature Move,” the first project of New City’s film production arm Chicago Film Project, has been making the international festival rounds for nearly a year. The weeklong engagement opening Friday at the Music Box is both a homecoming and a showcase for the city where it was made. The movie opens with shots of Devon Avenue, with its Indo-Pak grocery stores and highly saturated colors; this is where we meet Zaynab (cowriter and star Fawzia Mirza), a Pakistani Muslim lesbian lawyer with a specialty in immigration issues. Her recently widowed mother (Shabana Azmi), for whom she acts as caretaker, stays in the apartment and asks Allah for help in finding Zaynab a suitable husband.
Tonally rangy, “Signature Move” doesn’t confine Zaynab to a closet but it does focus on one woman’s deep reluctance to tell her mother what she doesn’t want to hear. Much of the script, cowritten by Lisa Donato, hews to conventional rom-com blueprints. Zaynab and her first legit love, Alma (Sari Sanchez), hit the ground stumbling after a passionate one-night stand. Meantime there’s another side of “Signature Move” fighting for its share of the screen time.
A broke client of Zaynab’s, played by a wry, tightly coiled Audrey Francis, offers to pay the lawyer with wrestling lessons. Coincidentally, Alma’s the daughter of a former star luchadora (Charin Alvarez). It’s a lot of plotting for a movie that, on one level, works best in its off-plot developments and atmosphere. The wrestling motif drops abruptly into “Signature Move,” a few minutes in; elsewhere, Azmi’s scenes risk repetition because the character herself is stuck, confined and on the verge of shaking up her life and opening her eyes to her daughter’s true self.
It doesn’t all work. But the film’s gently erratic personality is winning nonetheless, and it’s interesting to watch Reeder, in the first project she has done without a hand in the writing, make sense of the tones. At their best, the performances push “Signature Move” into a higher gear. Mirza’s sketch-comic timing and instincts are subdued here, mostly effectively; she has great presence and effortless gravity that bears out one character’s description of Zaynab as “cute, in a Dr. Zhivago kinda way.”
Sanchez and Alvarez are wonderful together and, in a handful of short scenes, Alvarez in particular suggests a life underneath and beyond what’s written. That’s true also for Azmi, the movie’s ringer, an internationally famous actress who does a great deal without saying a great deal. Brief (75 minutes minus the credits) to the point of frustration, “Signature Move” nonetheless marks a promising start to New City’s cinematic ambitions.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
“Signature Move” — 3 stars
No MPAA rating
Running time: 1:20
Opens: Friday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., www.musicboxtheatre.com.
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;
Watch the latest movie trailers.
More Top Picks Wine Fridges