Maryam Basir

(On TV, December 2021) One of the reasons why I keep watching BET original movies is that I never quite know what weird plotting curveballs they’re going to serve within well-worn formulas. In intent, they almost always go for pleasing the audience, but in the details, there’s an almost-refreshing lack of polish and discipline in the way the narratives are put together that echoes the sometimes slap-dash direction and set design under low-budget conditions. So it is that Holiday Heartbreak is, at its core, a solid man-learns-better story set against a holiday backdrop: a womanizer is cursed by a heartbroken witch to see his daughter fall for the kind of wrong kind of man. There are a few twists, though. Some of them are even good — as in: the curse manifests itself so long after that the man has had time to mature and become a better-enough person to recognize its true horror. Some of them, however, are weirder and more difficult to accept. For instance, the story doesn’t have a clear protagonist in mind, as it shifts for long stretches between father and daughter, the other character disappearing from the film during those moments. That’s clunky screenwriting in the first order, and that lack of control over the result is reflected in other plotting issues and contrivances such as a near-stranger falling asleep on a couch because he’s needed in the next morning’s scene. Holiday Heartbreak is also so insecure in its audience’s ability to follow along that it will repeat the same footage of the curse three times in fifteen minutes just to make sure EVERYONE gets the point. Oh, and the character is reformed enough to have had a longstanding new wife, but not so much as to have remained a playboy legend for the younger guys. What? For viewers used to polished scripts, there’s an earnest clumsiness to Holiday Heartbreak that almost becomes endearing. The film does fare better in other areas: While it’s clearly low-budget, it makes the most out of what it has. The actors are also not bad: Michael Colyar turns in a decent comic performance as the cursed father, while Maryam Basir looks terrific — although if sex-appeal is your thing, no one else in the film comes close to veteran A. J. Johnson as she comes dressed to flaunt it. Still, not even an attractive cast can quite pull together the divergent strands of a script that flies off in various directions, not only in narrative twists but also in tone and humour. Another rewrite or two would have helped a lot in maximizing the potential of the premise and delivering a far more satisfying film. But I get it, though — BET original films being executed on a shoestring budget, there’s probably no time for such niceties. So, I’ll fall back on the quirkiness of the result as entertainment in itself… even though I’d rather enjoy a film unironically rather than be interested by the ways in which it goes wrong.