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Every occasion of abject grief, embarrassment, disappointment, and failure recognized solely by teenage boys might be sourced to cosmological forces past their management or to a bummer ticket within the organic lottery. Imran J. Khan’s first function, “Mustache,” opts to merge the 2 underneath the identical awkward umbrella. If a lad might be betrayed by his personal physique, then actually it’s throughout the universe’s energy to impress that betrayal, laying the groundwork for early physique picture points dovetailing with hormonal, emotional, and cultural points concurrently. It’s one factor to develop unpleasant facial hair and one other on your of us to forbid you from shaving it.
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Life isn’t truthful. Ilyas (Atharva Verma), “Mustache’s” lead, finds that life is extremely unfair to him, rising up Muslim in a Pakistani-American family, surrounded by his ambivalent siblings, who contemplate his issues nuisances and don’t take them or him severely and intently ruled by his strict father, Hameed (Rizwan Manji). By comparability, his mom, Asiya (Meesha Shafi), is permissive. Later within the movie, we discover that she was an artist; later nonetheless, Ilyas asks her why she stopped portray, and in her curt, trim response, we get the sort of depth that Khan’s supporting forged broadly lack. It’s the second the place “Mustache” comes closest to totally realizing Ilyas’ world and giving it ballast, weight, anecdotes, and particulars in regards to the characters he interacts with all through the film’s slim operating time.
The restrictions on Khan’s ensemble maintain “Mustache” again from potential greatness. Ilyas is well-defined, each in writing and in Verma’s efficiency, as gawky, hesitant, and remoted from the neighborhood; he desires to be good, however he additionally desires out of life what he’s proscribed by his background. Being a great Muslim takes grit and willpower, not less than for a 13-year-old. It means self-denial, which for a excessive school-aged child means avoiding participation in many of the identical actions as his friends. That sucks. Ilyas may in all probability tolerate rising out his sparse and scrappy lip foliage if that’s all that residing as much as the “good Muslim” appellation required. But it requires a lot extra, and he desires extra out of his teen years than he’s afforded.
“Mustache” tows its plot out of Ilyas’ expertise. Sick to dying of his classmates’ japes, Ilyas will get right into a scuffle with one other scholar on the Islamic personal faculty he attends; he’s a participant within the struggle however isn’t liable for beginning it. Unfortunately for him, faculty directors don’t care as a lot about who creates it and who they will most casually punish. Hence, they take away his scholarship as a consequence of his actions. Without the scholarship, the Islamic faculty is past Hameed’s monetary attain. Only one factor to do: plop Ilyas into public faculty, and go away him fuzzy on the small print. He doesn’t must know why. He simply has to understand he fumbled the bag, and that is what you get when you’ll be able to’t deal with the each day rigors of excellent Muslimhood.
Parents simply don’t perceive. This is as true in the present day as in 1988. “Mustache” parallels Ilyas’ struggles with household and religion in opposition to Hameed’s; Hameed carries the burden of offering for his household within the period of dotcom calamity, the place the one certainty is that the Internet’s bubble has burst and he’s proper within the splash zone. But he’s conflicted as a Muslim man, too, even when Khan solely goes as far as to recommend Hameed’s worries when he may dramatize them as an alternative. The business often acknowledges Manji as a comic book actor with a variety spanning “simpering” and “foolish.” “Mustache” provides him the prospect to flee that pigeonhole. He seizes it with a way of goal. Even at his harshest, Hameed means for the very best. Manji units apart severity for the sort of disappointment each guardian is aware of effectively as a result of the frustration collides with their hopes for and love for his or her kids.
Hameed desires Ilyas to find himself. He’s additionally accustomed to a framework that restricts self-discovery, which is why Ilyas plots his personal downward spiral; he figures that if he causes sufficient hassle, Hameed and Asiya could have no alternative however to yank him out of public faculty and put him again in personal faculty. A brief however efficient montage of his varied plans in motion tells us a few important particulars in regards to the child: He’s not that good at being unhealthy – passing off a bag of oregano as weed, changing a Big Mac with a halal burger however forgetting to toss the packaging – and Khan could be very, superb at hitting punchlines utilizing customary setups, tuned to the particulars of a Muslim upbringing. “Mustache” is unfailingly humorous, alternating between fond chuckles and massive stomach laughs and succeeding, and with out dropping the specificity wanted to floor its cultural mores.
But the film misses alternatives to leverage Khan’s fantastic secondary forged and to present their characters their due. They do essentially the most with the least or with little or no, which in equity, is to their credit score. All the identical, for the importance they’ve in Ilyas’ life, they learn as outlines after they should learn as folks. Grant that “Mustache” is his story and never theirs. Grant additionally that Hameed’s story informs Ilyas’ story and that Khan and Manji tease out sufficient of what makes Hameed tick to justify higher improvement. Still, “Mustache” does its job. It provides Ilyas catalysts for progress apart from the cookie duster hanging out underneath his nostril, and the writing invitations us to chortle with him, not at him as a result of it’s one factor to chortle and one other factor to sneer. We’ve all been the place Ilyas is. “Mustache” merely supplies a contemporary context for the “where.” [C+]
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