Love in the Age of Deportation: Amira & Sam

One of last year’s best films — and certainly the most engaging rom-com in a good many years — was Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick. Three years earlier, Nanjiana’s Silicon Valley co-star Martin Starr starred in another mid-budget rom-com about a cross-cultural romance. Written and directed by Sean Mullin and distributed by Drafthouse Films, and set in 2008, five years after the invasion of Iraq, Amira & Sam is a mid-budget romance set in New York City that is also a plea for American values eroded by the 9/11 fallout.

The film is Mullin’s first as a writer/director, and in it he channels his own experiences as an active service member of the U.S. Army who assisted on the scene when the Twin Towers were attacked. Like Mullin, who has experience in the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre, Starr’s lead, Sam Seneca, is a returning vet with a secret passion for stand-up comedy.

Maybe “passion” is the wrong word. Starr makes an unusual rom-com lead. In TV’s Party Down and Silicon Valley, Starr plays droll, cynical geek types, a resentful outsider with dead-eyed stars who unspools his dialogue in slow, devastating commentaries. Here, he’s shaved his beard and toned the nihilism way down, but kept a bit of that alienation. His Sam, who has returned from a tour of Iraq, is solid and quietly honorable, working as a building security guard.

The script pushes his saintliness — he won’t take money from his cousin, he won’t make false claims for disability despise the suggestion from Veteran Affairs — but Starr’s tone of vague bewilderment balances it nicely. It’s not that he’s some kind of hero, it’s more that while he was away America seems to have lost its balance.

Amira & Sam is a nice, low-key study in outsider status and non-conformity. Sam is paired up with an illegal Iraqi immigrant Amira Jafari (Dina Shihabi, a Middle Eastern immigrant herself) after she gets busted for selling pirate DVDs and hot-tails it out of there. Amira wears a hijab with skirts; she says ‘man’ and laughs easily; she’s caught between the cultures. It’s easy to picture another version of this story where the devout, uncertain Muslim woman is liberated by her white lover, but both parties are equal here, and their romance develops with sweetness and a little writerly awkwardness.

Sam watches over Amira as a favour to her uncle, who was an interpreter for his unit in Iraq. Amira has a distrust for soldiers after her brother got caught in crossfire in her home country, but finds herself falling for Sam. The film’s final crisis is her imminent deportation, and until the last few minutes it’s unclear what direction the two lovers are going to go in.

Amira & Sam makes the case for military values in a me-first culture that has forgotten them. The crass exploitation of The Troops to push agendas is mirrored in the film by Sam’s experience with his cousin’s Wall Street investment fund, whose investigation by the SEC is dismissed as the price of doing business. Apart from Amira and her uncle, Sam’s only real connection in the film is to potential fund investor who’s also a Vietnam vet (played by David Rasche). The two have a unshowy solidarity and shared understanding that contrasts with the heavily matey patter of his cousin, always patting on the back, always a salesman. When Charlie invites Sam to his engagement party/networking session, he asks him to come in uniform.

Looking back only a few years, Sam idealism and disorientation comes off as quaint. Pushed by Amira, Sam tries the open mic at a comedy club, and does a short set about coming home to find that America has lost its mind. But at this point Trump wasn’t even on the horizon.

The film has gained new resonance in the years since its release, in the hardening of political hearts, border fetishes, and the emerging visual vocabulary of detention and deportation. The threat of separation also speaks to British experiences: Brexit and the uncertain status of European spouses; Windrush and the Conservatives’ “hostile environment”; the growing political usefulness of anti-Them’uns rhetoric.

As a rom-com that advocates fair-play decency, Amira & Sam doesn’t have much firework fizzle. But its emotional reticence makes the inevitable final flourish all the more moving.