Martin Starr and Dina Shihabi…illicit love
“AMIRA & SAM” My rating: B
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
Sean Mullin’s “Amira & Sam” is a low-keyed gem, a little movie with a big heart.
It’s an opposites-attract romance, the lovers here being an American who has just completed several tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and an Iraqi girl living illegally in the U.S. because life back home has become too dangerous.
After a decade as a Green Beret, Sam (Martin Starr) has been discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to his native New York City. After his long absence he knows almost nobody. Fortunately Bassam (Laith Nakli), who served as Sam’s unit’s translator in Iraq, now lives in Brooklyn.
On a visit Sam meets Bassam’s niece, Amira (Dina Shihabi), and it’s hate at first sight. No retiring wallflower, Amira has nothing but ill will toward the American military after her brother was killed in a crossfire, and she exhibits pure contempt for her uncle’s friend.
She’s an interesting case… though she never goes out in public without the appropriate head covering, Amira will offset that traditional item of feminine modesty with a bit of cleavage and skin-tight jeans. Plus she likes to push her luck, peddling bootleg DVDs on Manhattan street corners.
When Amira runs afoul of the law and needs to hide out, Sam allows her to stay in his apartment. Little by little the two warm up to one another.
“Amira & Sam” is funny, sexy as hell (without ever getting lurid) and oddly melancholy. It’s a noteworthy feature debut for writer/director Mullin, a West Point graduate who, after leaving the service, went on to study film at Columbia University.
Starr and Shihabi make for hugely attractive lovers. He’s quiet and sincere with a deadly dry sense of humor (although he’s perhaps just a bit too unassertive to have been an Army sergeant with lots of combat experience).
She is angry and mouthy and given to delightful malapropisms (“I’m just f**king with your asshole”). Plus, like the wallflower in a ’60s rom-com who is revealed to be beautiful when she removes her glasses, Amira looks totally different when she doffs her headscarf and lets her hair fall around her face. (Know what? Female hair is terribly seductive. The mullahs get that right, at least.)
Not everything in “Amira & Sam” works. A subplot that has Sam getting a job with his high-rolling cousin on Wall Street (Paul Wesley) feels as though it was devised to provide Mullin with a soapbox for his comments on the current economic zeitgeist (the system, Sam is told by an insider, is “a cesspool of self interest”).
But where it counts — in the romance department — this movie nails it.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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