I Can’t Think Straight

While I definitely want to have pretentious, film festival or Oscar-bait WLW movies, sometimes it’s nice to see a movie that just has two women meeting each other, falling in love and ending up happy. I Can’t Think Straight is one such movie.

I Can’t Think Straight is about Tala, who is getting married. However, upon travelling to London, she meets Leyla and sparks fly. Both women struggle with their attraction to each other. For starters, both are in relationships with men when they meet. There are also familiar and cultural expectations for both Tala And Leyla. The fact that Leyla’s family is Indian and Tala’s are Jordanian is another roadblock in Tala and Leyla’s journey towards love.

I Can’t think Straight does a great job of balancing a great deal of personal and cultural identities while still remaining a lighthearted romance. In addition to Tala and Layla’s different countries of cultural origin, there is a religious divide. Leyla and her family are Muslim and while Tala and her family are Christians. Director Shamim Sarif does excellently in incorporating these aspects into her characters’ identity and lives. She also manages this without making a film that’s wholly about such aspects. Even with such a fraught cultural divide, the film never gets so dark or serious that it ceases to be a lighthearted romance. Sarif brilliantly finds the balance between not having their identities be throwaway aspects that aren’t mentioned even when they should be and having such identities and larger cultural conflicts make this romantic comedy a lot less comic.

As a director, Sarif has improved since their debut film The World Unseen. Admittedly, I Can’t Think Straight is also less ambitious a film. Either way, I Can’t Think Straight is cleaner and loses some of the roughness seen in The World Unseen. Sarif has improved a lot as a director in only one film and she’s not done yet. I very much want her to return to the genre of lesbian romances. She definitely has a knack for them. I would love to continue to see her grow as a director while providing quality WLW films.

Well-paced, cheerful and satisfying, I Can’t Think Straight is one of the better lesbian romantic comedies. On top of that, it is one of even fewer lesbian comedy films that revolves around women who are not white. I also really loved the reusing of The World Unseen stars Sheetal Sheth and Lisa Ray. Given how strong the two movies we have with these women, I’d really like to see even more collaborations between Sarif and these actresses. I want to see a whole series of movies where Sheth and Ray fall in love in different circumstances and genres. I don’t think watching this particular collaboration of director, and actors working together to create quality WLW films would ever get old for me.

Overall rating: 7.1/10

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