Starring Lisa Ray, Sheetal Sheth. Written by Kelly Moss, Shamim Sharif. Directed by Shamim Sharif. (14A) 97 min. Opens Nov 21.
Shamim Sharif’s second romantic melodrama about a lesbian relationship challenged by the conventions of race, faith and family (after the recently-released The World Unseen) is as trite as its title.
I Can’t Think Straight is a girl-meets-girl story inhabited by one-dimensional stereotypes (despairing mothers, sympathetic fathers, shallow siblings) and is as hackneyed as any among the multitude of romances clogging multiplexes. The two lovers, one from a Muslim-Indian family and the other a Palestinian Christian, confront their families with implausible histrionics and hover over their cellphones with love-struck uncertainty. Any appreciation of this bad soap opera as a guilty pleasure is dismantled by the movie’s technical clumsiness.
For a film that sets out to illustrate complicated relationships under threat from cultural conditioning and the expectations of normalcy, it’s a vapid waste of opportunity.