Joyland has been much trumpeted as the first Pakistani feature to bow at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film has garnered a lot of attention for featuring a transgender woman in what is, both in name and in fact, an Islamic Republic. To reduce the film to such cultural shorthand, however, would do first-time feature filmmaker Saim Sadiq a major disservice, as he offers a rich and delicate family drama steeped in local colours, but boasting of sentiments which could easily resonate elsewhere.
While driven by a married man’s romance with a flamboyant trans dancer, Joyland doesn’t go down that very well-travelled lane of straight men struggling with their closeted desires, or tragic trans individuals meeting a sorry fate in a hostile environment. (It’s worth noting that transgender rights are enshrined in law in Pakistan, including the availability of third-gender ID cards.) While sexuality is certain at the forefront of the film, gender – especially people’s suffocating self-perception of how they should live up to theirs – is the broader issue at hand.
Filming in old-school academy ratio, Sadiq – who studied anthropology and then filmmaking at Columbia University – has hemmed his characters in an entirely appropriate visual style, highlighting the confined environments and stifling norms they have to navigate on a daily basis. Apart from the framing, however, Sadiq refrains from pulling any other showy cinematographic stunt to make his point. Expanding on a premise he used for his 2019 short film Darling, which screened at Venice and Toronto, he relies on his own sturdy script to unravel the shimmering tensions tearing at his on-screen family. With its cast delivering empathetic performances throughout, Joyland should find destinations aplenty on the festival circuit after its premiere in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes.
Set in the city of Lahore, the film begins with a white ghost slowly moving through doors and spaces within a middle-class house. As it turns out, it’s just part of a hide-and-seek between the adults and the kids – but a spectre is indeed haunting the Ranas. Sitting literally at the helm of the family is the widowed, wheelchair-stricken Baba Amanullah (Salman Peerzada, from one of Pakistan’s best-known artistic and showbusiness clans); his eldest son Saleem (Sohail Sameer) is heir to the patriarch’s power and traits. His marriage with Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani) seems very traditional: he works while she plays homemaker and mother; at the start of the film, she gives birth to their third child.
The younger son, Haider (Ali Junejo), is feeble failure compared to the macho Saleem. He has been unable to hold a job and is derided by his friends for living off his wife Mumtaz (writer-actor Rasti Farooq). She is a make-up artist, a job she enjoys and excels at, and she’s much tougher in both physique and psyche than her husband. Asked to slaughter a goat to celebrate the birth of her niece, Haider dallies and dithers, and it’s eventually Mumtaz who is forced to wade in and slit the the animal’s throat.
Haider’s crisis-stricken masculinity takes a further hit when a friend brings him to a job interview, which is actually an audition at the local erotic theatre. Deeming this unseemly for him – plus he’s a bad dancer whose only stage experience is playing Juliet (as in Romeo and Juliet) in a school play – he nearly walks away in a huff. But he grudgingly signs up as a background dancer for Biba (Alina Khan), a trans dancer who is brilliant in her art and blunt in her manner – a mix which explains why a banner advertising her performance carries the tag line, “Shut Your Mouth!”
At first Haider finds himself ashamed of his work, and he hides its true nature to his father and wife. But he grows into the job as he becomes increasingly transfixed by Biba, a feeling which is soon reciprocated. Their blooming relationship is brought beautifully to the screen, with Sadiq hardly playing up its transgressive nature as Junejo and Khan, like two lovers of any stripe, nurture the frisson slowly towards an explosive consummation.
As Haider flourishes, Mumtaz flounders. She’s coerced by the men in the house to quit her job to help take care of domestic chores and prepare herself for “a little Haider”. It’s a turn of events that symbolises the tyranny of patriarchy, but also reveals its superficiality, too. While we don’t see any of the men doing hard work on screen, Mumtaz and Nucchi do all the heavy lifting at home. Sweating together, the two women bond over secret cigarette breaks and finally a night out at the amusement park in one of the rare times when we get to see them enjoying life. Sadiq even hints – in a small physical gesture which is blink and gone – at Nucchi’s possible feelings for her younger sister-in-law, whose boldness she admires and possibly envies.
Joyland is filled with such delicate touches, with Sadiq refraining from heavy-handedly condemning the destructive gender oppression hovering over each and every one of his characters (and, to a larger extent, society in general).
Having contributed significantly to the work of Lebanese filmmaker Mounia Akl’s award-winning work (including last year’s Venice/Toronto hit Costa Brava, Lebanon), young cinematographer Joe Saade bolsters Sadiq’s screenplay effectively with a range of visual devices. Close-ups allow us to get intimate with these conflicted characters, and zooms in and out reveal Mumtaz’s contracting and expanding mental states. In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching and transcendental scenes, a row is heightened by giving the participants excessive headroom, as if some invisible power looms above them, a harbinger of tragedies to come.
Director-screenwriter-editor: Saim Sadiq
Cast: Rasti Farooq, Alina Khan, Sarwat Gilanimme
Producers: Apoorva Guru Charan, Sarmad Sultan Khoosat, Lauren Mann
Executive producers: Ramin Bahrani, William Olsson, Jen Goyne Blake, Tiffany Boyle, Elsa Ramo, Hari Charana Prasad, Sukanya Puvvula, Oleg Dubson, Kathrin Lohmann, Owais Ahmed
Director of photography: Joe Saade
Production designer: Kanwal Khoosat
Music composer: Abdullah Siddiqui
Sound designer: Nathan Ruyle, Faiz Zaidi
Production companies: All Caps, Khoosat Films
World sales: WME
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Urdu
126 minutes
