I also saw this at the Toronto Inter. Film Festival. I came to see Lisa Ray, who was actually at the screening along with the director. What made the movie for me was Sheetal Sheth. Yes, she had a more flamboyant part than Lisa, so she had more to work with, but she blew me away. Where has she been hiding? Unbelievably gorgeous.

As for the movie itself, it reinforces the theme found in Fire--don't beat up your wife or she'll turn Lesbian on you. If Indians really beat up their wives like this, they deserve to have them turn Lesbian.

The police were just over the top--it made those sections almost comical, not menacing. More subtlety would have gone a long way.

The restaurant looked way too much like a set, and it would have been a lot more effective if all the blacks/coloreds/Indians that were supposed to be beaten down actually looked beaten down once in a while. They looked way too happy most of the time.

But these were minor quibbles. Lisa and Sheetal alone make this a good movie, whether you are Lesbian or straight.

Before I Can't Think Straight, there was this film. Both were written and directed by Shamim Sarif, and starred Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth - a combination that assures excellence.

In a background of oppression in South Africa in 1952, we view a struggle for personal freedom.

Amina (Sheth) wants to be free to live her life as a lesbian without bigotry. Miriam (Ray) wants to be free of a demanding and philandering husband. Jacon (David Dennis),a half-black wants to love a white woman (Grethe Fox).

We can only assume that it works out for two of the three characters, and that will have to satisfy us.

This simply could not be any worthier: the chief keywords here being South Africa; apartheid; multiculturalism. And lesbians. A richly textured 12-part epic might be constructed around that tidy grouping, but author Shamim Sarif gave us a single award-winning novel instead, based on her grandmother's recollections of 1950s Cape Town. Less agreeably, and most unusually for a writer, she has also been given free hand to script and direct her own movie adaptation. Really bad move.

Fiercely independent Amina (played by the Indian-American Sheetal Sheth) literally wears the trousers as owner of a Cape Town café in 1952. She's always getting into trouble with the police for serving "blecks". She's also something of a pariah within her own prejudiced immigrant community for speaking out against the subjugation of women. One day her counterpart turns up. Miriam (Indian-Canadian Lisa Ray) is a subservient housewife, mother and shopkeeper, married to racist, chauvinist pig Omar (Parvin Dabas),who in turn is having an affair with his sister-in-law Farah (Natalie Becker) under poor Miriam's nose. Amira is smitten. The lady's ripe for turning. But will she ever persuade Miriam to shrug off her shackles and find true love?

Never mind the world, this will probably end up a film unseen for the most part, but that doesn't automatically make it some kind of ghettoised gem. Like Sarif's other lesbian drama I Can't Think Straight (also featuring Sheth and Ray) this is queer cinema by default only, too mimsy and soapy a concoction to be regarded as anything other than a daytime TV movie.

If the direction is flatter than a chapatti, the performances are mostly amateur hour, with cringeworthy dialogue clamouring to be heard above an hysterical din of a score; tremulous strings and fussily tinkling pianos drowning each and every soft focus scene in caramelised gloop. It's certainly a huge letdown after opening the film with Nina Simone's gorgeous rendition of 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free' - all-purpose protest song and knowing shout-out to the singer's significant gay fan base.

The leading ladies frantically bat their lashes at one another, but with so little chemistry between them they'd produce more sparks trying to light a cigarette with a dodgy disposable. Miriam's sexual awakening during a driving lesson is also unconvincing. "You didn't come to give me a driving lesson, did you?" Miriam hotly accuses Amina. "So why did you come?" This exchange, after they've already snogged.

Most damagingly, for a film set during an era when flouting racial and gender conventions could land you on Robben Island for years, there is absolutely zero sense of danger. It's as if Sarif is so confident audiences are already up to speed with the politics (or with her novel),that she hasn't bothered with the important stuff: atmospherics, a feel for the time and place.

The real drama, it seems, is going on elsewhere: a subplot involving the café's mixed-race, middle-aged co-owner Jacob (David Dennis) secretly romancing Madeleine (Grethe Fox),a white postmistress. But largely, what we're left with is a pair of total babes brushing lips. The only threat for this glamorous pair would appear to be smudged cosmetics.