Catch Me Daddy, Cannes Film Festival - film review

A classic chase story which addresses a serious problem within multicultural British society
On the run: Sameena Jabeen Ahmed in Catch Me Daddy
David Sexton20 May 2014

Catch Me Daddy belongs to its brilliant cinematographer, Robbie Ryan (Philomena, Wuthering Heights). He has given this film about an Asian girl in Yorkshire being hunted down for having supposedly dishonoured her family extraordinary visual power. From bleak moorland to scummy fast food shops, from inside a trailer-home to inside a car, every shot here has a kinetic energy that's rare in British cinema. It almost has a Coen brothers vibe.

Mainly, it's a classic chase story, familiar from Westerns. British-Pakistani Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and her unemployed white British boyfriend Aaron (Conor McCarron) have fled from her family to hide out in a caravan park, happily toking away, Laila bringing in the money working in a hair salon. But her father Tariq (Wasim Zakir) has sent out Laila's softhearted brother Zaheer (Ali Ahmed) and an Asian tough guy, Junaid (Anwar Hussain), to find them and bring her back for punishment, assisted by a pair of hired white British thugs, junkie Tony (Gary Lewis) and truly nasty piece of work, Barry (Barry Nunney).

They track the pair down but when Zaheer insists on talking to his sister on his own, it all goes wrong for the posse. Laila and Aaron make a break for it, and during the chase, from Calderdale to Leeds, swirlingly filmed at night-time, the Asian and white thugs begin to fall out, pretty violently. One particularly gruesome killing involves first a box-cutter, then the victim being driven over by an SUV, back and forth.

This debut from Daniel Wolfe, co-written with his brother Matthew, seems to take the barbarism of "honour killing" almost as a given behind this hunt, a pretext for a thriller rather than a subject in itself. There's little back story. That changes towards the end when Laila returns to her father – and submits to him, hoping that reminding him she was his "chum-chum" as a little girl will win his forgiveness. But he says she's a stranger to him now. This closing scene is the weakest in the film and does little to explain or challenge the values of her Pakistani family – perhaps Wolfe felt it was not his place to do that from his own background?

Catch Me Daddy is an odd mix, then, of a straight thriller, certainly very competently made, and a different kind of indie film addressing a serious problem within a multicultural society. It certainly gives you one of the bleakest, most offputting views of contemporary Britain in recent cinema, seeming all the more dismaying in the sunlight in Cannes.

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