Cultural tragedy drowns in blood

Like the blood that spurts from a slaughtered goat’s throat in the opening minutes of “Beyond Honor,” the outrage in writer-director Varun Khanna’s debut spews forth with an urgency that often turns to desperation. After she witnesses her father’s participation in sacrificial slaughter as a child, we next glimpse the adult Sahira (Ruth Osuna) bopping along the paths of the American university where she’s a pre-med student, crooning show tunes to her boyfriend (Jason David Smith). But the carnage promised by the movie’s prologue is not long in coming.

Sahira’s father, Mohammed, played with wooden menace by Wadie Andrawis, is a surly Muslim patriarch who disapproves of his daughter’s Westernization with a passion that quickly turns to violence. Although he’s married to an American woman (Laurel Melagrano) and has two children (Ajay Vidure’s surly younger brother is the other), the movie gives no hint as to why a man who despises all things American would resettle in Southern California. Any attempt to give depth to the characters might have disrupted Khanna’s schematic intentions.

Father-daughter tensions come to a head when Sahira gives in to her boyfriend’s advances. (For a character who’s invariably presented as sympathetic, the boyfriend seems willfully blind to her precarious situation.) A swarm of veiled “aunties” descends on the house and Sahira is pinned down and subjected to female genital mutilation, an act that “Beyond Honor” crassly depicts with buckets of fake blood and near-gynecological perspectives. Khanna is evidently intent on sounding the alarm, but movies like “Moolaade” and “The Day I Will Never Forget” have shown that it’s possible to do so without cheap theatrics.

As the movie turns into a shrill revenge tragedy, complexity is discarded. The characters might as well be stapled to Popsicle sticks. In his sole sympathetic moment, Mohammed complains that, since immigrating to the U.S., he is treated as if he were “a terrorist.” But that’s just how the film depicts him.

*

‘Beyond Honor’

MPAA rating: Unrated

An International Film Circuit and Cine02 release. Writer-director Varun Khanna. Producers Khanna, Harkeerat Dhillon. Director of photography Dinesh Kampani. Editor Victoria English. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

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