Saim Sadiq (2022)

The title refers actually to an amusement park in Lahore, metaphorically and ironically to modern-day Pakistan society as depicted in Saim Sadiq’s debut feature (which has Urdu and Punjabi dialogue).  Widespread critical praise for Joyland was only to be expected.  It’s an indictment of suppressive patriarchy.  A transgender woman is one half of a pivotal romance.  What’s more, after Joyland had been granted a censor’s certificate, growing controversy led to Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s banning the film’s domestic release on the grounds that it traduced traditional Pakistani and Islamic values; countervailing protests got the ban lifted (except in the Punjab province) but some cuts were made.  For any viewer with a smattering of foreknowledge that’s three right-on boxes ticked before Joyland has even started.  It’s a heartening relief to discover that Saim Sadiq doesn’t simply deal in worthy themes – he deals with them in a nuanced, tough-minded way.  While making clear where his sympathies lie, Sadiq sensitively and tenaciously resists the easy option.

He briskly introduces the Rana family, middle class though not rich, and the home they share in central Lahore: elderly widowed paterfamilias Amanullah (Salmaan Peerzada), usually known as Abba; his two sons, Saleem (Sohail Sameer) and Haider (Ali Junejo); the sons’ wives, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani) and Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq).  Haider and Mumtaz have no children; Saleem and Nucchi already have three and the film’s only a few minutes old when Nucchi gives birth to a fourth.  It’s soon clear that Amanullah is culturally conservative.  All the more striking then, that one of the household’s two breadwinners is female:  Mumtaz earns a decent wage doing bridal make-up while her husband, long unemployed, helps Nucchi with running the home.  Haider’s domestic duties also include showering and massaging his physically disabled father – Abba’s in a wheelchair most of the time – as well as slitting a goat’s throat in the courtyard, when the butcher expected to perform the job fails to show up.  Haider can’t go through with that; his wife happens to be around and does the necessary.  Mild-mannered and, in varying ways, despised by his father, elder brother and sister-in-law, Haider is more comfortable cooking or cleaning.  At the start he suggests a male Cinderella but Joyland, written by Sadiq and Maggie Briggs, proves to be far from a Cinderella story.

In the opening scene, Haider plays a kind of close-range hide-and-seek with two of Nucchi’s young daughters:  covered in a sheet and spun around by the girls, he has to find them by reaching out in darkness – they squeal with pretend fear as he grabs at them.  The game is interrupted by their mother’s going into labour and it’s Haider who takes Nucchi, on his moped, to hospital.  It’s only after they arrive there that we learn he’s her brother-in-law, not her husband – Saleem (the family’s other breadwinner) arrives on the scene a little later.  In a hospital corridor Haider catches sight of a woman the front of whose clothes is heavily bloodstained.  He soon encounters her again when he reports to a local erotic dance theatre, where his friend Qaiser (Ramiz Law) has told him there’s work going.  So there is but not what Haider expected.  The theatre boss (Honey Albela) is recruiting new backing dancers for the main female performers; the latter include Biba (Alina Khan), the woman Haider first saw at the hospital.  Haider‘s angry with Qaiser when he learns what he’s applying to do but beggars can’t be choosers.  Trying to move around on stage, he’s wooden, arrhythmic and derided by the boss, who hires him even so, along with Qaiser and others, for Biba’s retinue.

Humiliating as the process of getting the job is for Haider, it transforms his status in the family and turns the Ranas’ domestic arrangements, and Haider’s marriage, upside down.  Although Abba strongly disapproves of the theatre, he’s somewhat placated when Haider lies that he’s been appointed its manager, on a monthly salary of 40,000 rupees.  Nucchi, with a new baby to care for, can’t look after the house alone.  Ammanullah decrees that Mumtaz must therefore leave the beauty salon immediately:  it’s neither right nor necessary for a wife to be in paid employment when her husband is.  Besides, it’s high time that Mumtaz had a baby of her own, especially since the family needs a son to continue the line and, as Abba sees it, to compensate for Nucchi’s four daughters.  Mumtaz is dismayed but has no real option but to obey her father-in-law’s diktat.  Once Haider has started work at the theatre, she sees little of him in the evenings.  He returns home at an increasingly late hour.

As a performer, Biba is the theatre’s star turn but she’s also transgender and the boss gives preferential treatment to the company’s established diva – even though the latter, energetic as she is on stage, is older, bulkier and less glamorous.  Biba wants to be advertised outside the theatre, like the fat lady, by a larger-than-life-size figure of herself; unlike her rival, Biba has to pay for the replica with her own money.  Haider’s dancing doesn’t improve until Biba, who’s also drawn to his distinctive lack of machismo, orders him to stay behind for individual tuition.  She asks Haider to remove his top; as soon as he does, he dances more easily and rhythmically.  They start going back to her apartment at the end of the working day.  One evening, Biba explains her bloodied clothes at the hospital:  a friend of hers, also a trans woman, was shot dead by a man, right in front of Biba.  On another evening Haider collects the cut-out of Biba on her behalf.  He can’t find a place to store it at the theatre so brings it home on his moped.  This journey supplies Joyland‘s standout image, both comical and crucial.

Sadiq soon makes clear that Haider and Mumtaz don’t have a vigorous sex life but keeps his powder dry as to the reasons for that:  there’s usually a practical obstacle anyway in the form of one or other of Saleem and Nucchi’s youngsters sharing Haider and Mumtaz’s bed and whom they don’t want to disturb.  When he brings home the giant figure of Biba, Mumtaz helps Haider put it on the roof for the time being.  He has by now confided in his wife what he really does at the theatre.  Although he hasn’t told her about his growing feelings for Biba, Mumtaz’s feelings of isolation and abandonment become starkly evident as she takes to watching with binoculars, from an upstairs window of the house, a man who regularly masturbates in the alley below.  She herself masturbates as she watches the wanking man.  She’s caught in the act by a disgusted Saleem.

It’s not lost on his theatre colleagues that Haider is spending more and more time with Biba.  Qaiser and the other backing dancers josh him, demanding to know what exactly he and Biba get up to, what’s under her costume, etc:  Biba walks in on the interrogation and breaks it up.  At this stage, she and Haider have been physically intimate without, it seems, having slept together.  The incident with the other dancers precipitates this and thus heralds the sudden collapse of their relationship.  Biba is thrilled that the theatre boss has agreed to increase her pay; when she tells Haider she’ll be able to afford to have ‘all my surgeries done’, he gently replies that he likes her the way she is.  Conveying the huge cut-out of Biba on his moped, Haider sat facing her; as they now prepare to have sex, he lies face down.  Biba furiously tells him to leave her bed, her apartment and the theatre.

In other words, Saim Sadiq doesn’t evade – as François Ozon in The New Girlfriend (2014) did evade – the question of what partners in a cis-trans liaison may see in each other.  It’s obvious enough in Joyland that Biba finds Haider an attractive man; this viewer kept wondering if Biba appealed to Haider as a woman or specifically as a trans woman or as a person whose feminine appearance concealed male genitalia.  When Haider takes up a receptive partner position he makes the answer pretty clear and, as far as Biba is concerned, kills their romance.  Sadiq deplores the repression of sexual orientation and gender fluidity.  He doesn’t ignore the fact that what Biba and Haider want from each other makes them incompatible.

This is typical of Sadiq’s approach.  While Amanullah’s autocratic misogyny is detestable, there are hints that he, like everyone else in the world of the film, is stuck in a role that he must play.  When Mumtaz and Nucchi go on a rare girls’-night-out to Joyland, the Ranas’ widowed neighbour, Fayyaz (Sania Saeed), is more than happy to look after Abba for the evening:  Nucchi jokes to Mumtaz that Fayyaz has had her eye on the old man since the day she became a widow.  Fayyaz is undaunted when Abba wets himself and makes a puddle on the floor but he can’t bring himself to accept the help she offers.  Circumstances nevertheless conspire to mean that he and she spend the night under the same roof.  The next morning, it’s Fayyaz’s son, appalled that this has happened, who lays down the chauvinist law to the family – Abba included.

While Biba is the most conspicuous female role in Joyland, Mumtaz, in another unexpected development, becomes no less important in the story.  Despite the odds against it happening, she learns not only that she’s pregnant by Haider but that their child will be a boy (though Nucchi and Saleem were told the same before their fourth daughter was born).  After receiving the news, Mumtaz tells Nucchi she feels like ‘running away’; she then says she’s only joking but Nucchi can tell she’s serious.  Haider’s tearful reaction to the pregnancy is harder to gauge.  Mumtaz tells him almost immediately after Biba has thrown him out:  he may be shedding tears of regret, remorse or relief.  Like his job, Mumtaz’s pregnancy instantly enhances her standing in the family (as it does Haider’s) although Saleem, after what he witnessed Mumtaz doing at the window, continues to distrust her.

Abba’s seventieth birthday becomes a double celebration but when Mumtaz insists on playing energetic games with her daughters Nucchi is alarmed by the expectant mother’s febrile behaviour.  Later in the day, Mumtaz takes a bottle of cleaning fluid from the bathroom and drinks from it with fatal results.  The family and their neighbours gather to pray as her body is washed, wrapped in a shroud and removed for burial – a ritual that Sadiq presents as carefully compassionate, in contrast to other traditions that Mumtaz has been on the receiving end of.  In one of their happier conversations, Haider asks Biba, light-heartedly, if she cares enough for him that she would come to his funeral.  In a very brief reappearance in the story, Biba attends the obsequies for Mumtaz; she and Haider exchange a look but no words.  He’s angrily voluble, however, in reproaching his brother when Saleem vilifies Mumtaz for killing herself and, more important (to Saleem), her unborn son.

A few things aren’t clear, which may well be what Sadiq intends but is mildly frustrating even so.  How come Haider is hired at the theatre after his inept audition?  If the idea is that men willing to work with a transgender woman are few and far between, that’s not what comes across; it seems, rather, that the theatre boss just isn’t prepared to spend any more time recruiting new dancers.  Haider is untruthful about the job he’s got but what about the salary?  It seems unlikely that a backing dancer would be paid the same as a theatre manager – even more unlikely that, if Haider isn’t bringing home the money he claims to earn, this doesn’t cause ructions with Abba.  It’s Fayyaz who first sees the cut-out of Biba on the roof of the house and, scandalised, reports this to Ammanullah.  Haider gets a telling off but the incident doesn’t have the fallout you’d expect.  I never understood who in the family, other than Mumtaz, found out the true nature of Haider’s employment or, if no one did, how it could remain a secret.

These plotting niggles carry little weight, though, beside the strengths of Sadiq’s direction.   He makes judicious, powerful use of symbolism.  That game at the start, where Haider is in the dark and, as it were, under wraps.  Haider, shirtless and stripped of his inhibitions, moving freely in the outdoor area where Biba rehearses her dancers (a space that contrasts with the often tight, claustrophobic interiors of the Ranas’ home).  The gigantic cut-out of Biba as the elephant in the room – or on the roof.  An air-conditioning unit that the family buys and which, in a potent image of female domestic hard labour, Nucchi and Mumtaz, drag across the floor.  Sadiq is even more sparing with interruptions to the linear progress of the story:  there’s a single flashback – late on and as touching as it’s dramatically effective.  In her apartment, Biba showed Haider a shell she got from ‘the French beach’, a Karachi location of which he’s never heard.  He mentioned it to Mumtaz, who said they should go there sometime.  After her suicide, Haider takes a train and, during the journey, remembers calling on Mumtaz before their arranged marriage took place.  Haider evidently likes his bride-to-be but he asks if she wants to go through with the wedding.  If, in doing this, he’s aware of his sexuality and wants to give Mumtaz a chance to escape, the plan fails.  Because he takes the trouble to ask the question, she’s all the more keen to marry him.  Back in the present, Haider arrives in Karachi, goes to the French beach, leaves his bag on the shore and, in Joyland’s closing image, walks fully clothed out into the sea.

In a strong cast, Ali Junejo is outstanding as Haider, whose meekness and fearful diffidence blend interestingly with the actor’s handsome, somewhat weasel-like face.  Although less emotionally complex than Junejo, Alina Khan, the first transgender person to have a lead role in a Pakistani film, leavens Biba’s feisty, confrontational professional persona with an air of melancholy.  (It’s a pity there isn’t more of Khan’s dynamic dancing.)  Rasti Farooq builds her characterisation of Mumtaz patiently and persuasively.  In the supporting roles, Sarwat Gilani is particularly good as Nucchi, who, from the moment her water breaks, takes matters in her stride until she’s disconcerted by Mumtaz’s reactions to impending motherhood.

Saim Sadiq also does a fine job of illustrating the collision of ancient and modern in the culture that he describes.  The slaughter of the goat, whose blood pools on the courtyard tiles, is part of the same world as Fayyaz’s angry son, who can’t understand why his mother needs to spend time at the Ranas’ when he has bought her a Netflix subscription.  It makes sense that the mod cons in evidence keep breaking down – the air-con unit, the electrics in the beauty salon and, later, in the theatre.  Mumtaz gets her colleagues to switch on their mobile phone lights so she can continue making up an understandably panicked bride.  Haider convinces Biba and the other dancers to carry on with their performance pending power being restored.  Maybe that bit is symbolic, too.  The show must go on is a key theme of Joyland.  But so is the matter of what happens when it no longer can.

21 May 2023