Haifaa al-Mansour (2012)

The significance of Wadjda as an event in world cinema is undeniable:  it’s the first feature-length picture by a female Saudi director (who also wrote the screenplay).   I was put off by this until I read Toby Lichtig’s review in the TLS.  He, like me, had wondered, because Wadjda is such a worthy enterprise, if it ‘could be tricky to judge the film on its own merits’.  Lichtig’s mild apprehension may have made his experience of watching the movie, and finding that he genuinely liked it, all the more enjoyable.  And his summary of the plot suggested an attractive balance of metaphor and particularity.  The eponymous heroine, an eleven-year-old girl living in Riyadh, determines to get a bicycle.  Although Wadjda’s family are well off, Saudi women aren’t meant to ride bikes in public and her mother won’t buy her daughter one.  Wadjda therefore enters a school competition to answer questions on and recite verses from the Koran.  The competition carries a substantial cash prize.

I’m glad I read Toby Lichtig’s TLS piece and went to see Wadjda – although I don’t think I inferred from the film, as Lichtig did, that Haifaa al-Mansour saw ‘quiet, gradual liberalization’ as all that’s needed in Saudi Arabia.  It’s true that al-Mansour has a light touch but Western audiences at least are almost bound to be dismayed by her description of the treatment of Saudi women by their husbands and Saudi girls in their schools.  Wadjda is immediately introduced as a mildly comical subversive:  the camera moves along a row of schoolgirls’ feet – just one pair of them is shod in trainers.   But for Wadjda’s unhappy mother (herself a teacher, at another school) the costume dichotomy between her life indoors and outdoors is stark.  (As Lichtig says, at home she ‘slinks around in casual clothes … in public she is a pair of eyes’.)   The wardrobe aspect of the mother’s life is increasingly upsetting:  because she hasn’t borne him a son, her absent husband is thinking of taking a second wife; Wadjda’s mother (she isn’t given a name) looks hopefully at a red dress she could buy to try and attract him back.  The main plus points of the culture on display in the film are the food that the mother makes (primarily for the husband and a group of his friends) and the chanting of the Koranic verses by several different female characters – this is beautiful both in the feeling and in the variety of the voices.

Although, in one sense, there’s never been a film like Wadjda before, it’s generic as a ‘competition’ movie, with elements that are familiar and appealing.  The motive for entering the competition in the first place comes back to bite.  A faltering start is followed by rapid progress to become a leading contender.  The win, when it happens, is heavily qualified – by the winner’s public flouting of the values of the contest.  The prize is snatched away.  Then there’s a finale in which things turn out right in a way that makes the protagonist – and the audience – much happier than the competitive outcome did.  Whether a competition movie is exciting (like Saturday Night Fever) or so-so (like Populaire), it’s essential that you root for the main character.   That certainly happens in Wadjda, even though Haifaa al-Mansour’s political intentions rather get in the way of each other within the competition framework.  Wadjda struck me as far too canny and self-possessed to announce to the whole school at the moment of her triumph that she’ll spend the winnings on a bike.  (The scandalised head teacher refuses to let Wadjda have her winnings, which are donated to a Palestinian good cause instead.  The Wadjda you’ve come to know during the film would have prepared for this moment:  she would have told the head that she wanted to talk with her family about which good cause(s) to give the money to.)  But this setback is necessary to tie the themes up:  Wadjda’s mother buys her daugher a bike instead of spending money on the seductive red dress that she now knows to be a lost cause.  The final image of the girl on her bike is, of course, symbolically powerful, even if the relationship between Wadjda and her conveyance is never as humanly compelling as that of the Dardennes’ kid with a bike.  The image chimes with another extraordinary one from earlier in the film – when Wadjda, from a distance, sees a bicycle that looks to be travelling through the sky before the camera reveals that it’s being carried atop another vehicle.

There was a sizeable turnout at the Renoir for an early evening show of a film now in its third week.  This was good to see but the audience laughter was less good to hear:  there was a condescension in the chuckles – the things kid say and do, and Saudi kids too!  Still, Waad Mohammed at Wadjda is first rate:  her face is an interesting combination of plainness and vitality and she knows how to point a line.  The children – including Abdullrahman Al Gohani as the young boy who takes a (sentimental) shine to Wadjda and Dana Abdullilah as one of her competition rivals – are more expressive than the adults, who are all good enough but mostly unsurprising.   Reem Abdullah as the mother and Ahd as the head teacher make the strongest impression.  Of course, Wadjda is bound to be remembered less for its quality than for getting made at all.  This doesn’t mean it’s not skilful and entertaining but it would have had to be a masterpiece to upstage the circumstances in which it was shot – on the streets of Riyadh, with Haifaa al-Mansour, because she wasn’t allowed to mix publicly with the men in her crew, directing most scenes via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

7 August 2013