It’s fitting that Saim Sadiq’s debut feature Joyland begins with a birth — an event burdened by society’s attempts to consecrate the arbitrary. A water breaks. A panicked woman instructs her diffident brother-in-law to get the bike. They ride through the streets of Lahore to the hospital, where nurses fling questions and instructions like darts. The man — his name is Haider (Ali Junejo) — tries his best to keep up. His brother, Saleem (Sohail Sameer), rushes into the ward just in time. A baby girl is born to a family desperate for a boy.
Joyland is a family saga, one that Sadiq uses to observe how gender norms constrict, and then asphyxiate, individuals. The Ranas feel trapped — by respectability, by family, by vague notions of honor. Bound by their duty to roles they quietly question, the members of this clan slowly suffer under the weight of obligation and expectations. What happens to them — individually and collectively — is a process that Sadiq’s film chronicles with aching consideration.
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Joyland
In the maternity ward, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani) — sullen and sweaty — stares off into the distance as Saleem gently strokes her face. They were told the child would be a boy. Saleem queries the doctors and then reluctantly submits to his reality. His disappointment radiates off the screen. This brief interaction reveals strokes of the family’s suffocation and highlights one of Joyland’s strengths. Sadiq, whose film Darling won the Orizzonti Prize for Best Short at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, has a gift for mood-setting. His approach to constructing scenes is languid, slow, unhurried. The significance of interactions, objects, snippets of dialogue, have room to evolve, their meanings becoming clear as the film grows more confident.
Saleem calls his father, and eventually he and Nucchi leave the hospital. Life must go on. That means Haider resumes his duties as a stay-at-home husband — caring for his gaggle of nieces, helping Nucchi around the house. His wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), a strong-willed make-up artist, spends her days working at a salon. No one knows what Saleem does with his time. Their father (Salmaan Peerzada) — the patriarch whom they fear — spends his days in his wheelchair, watching his family as a king does his court.
The beginning of Joyland presents a family straining to align themselves with convention. Haider doesn’t work, which makes him a failure in the eyes of his father. When he is not able to slaughter a goat, frustrations with him deepen.
Haider’s opportunity to prove himself arrives when he lands a job. He is coy with the details, knowing that his family would not approve of him working as a background dancer for Biba, a trans woman, at an erotic theater. The job announcement marks a shift in family life. Mumtaz reluctantly stays home with Nucchi, and Haider finds himself thrust into a world unlike his own.
Biba (Alina Khan) represents freedom, at least from Haider’s limited perspective. I say limited because this doe-eyed, chronically apologetic young man lacks a shocking amount of curiosity about his boss, whom he immediately falls in love with. After the first rehearsal, where Haider struggles to learn the choreography, he begins following Biba around like a puppy. He watches as she commands her background dancers, demands respect from the theater manager and chips away at her dreams to become a star. Her actions require a level of courage Haider desires but never quite achieves. As their romance morphs into a full-fledged affair, one wishes that Haider would ask Biba more questions about herself, her life and what drives her. Instead, he remains stuck in a feedback loop of passivity, one that becomes increasingly hard to tolerate.
Haider wants to change — that much is clear — but perhaps not as profoundly as a viewer might expect. His interactions with Biba come to us in fits and starts, these tender, sensuous moments frequently interrupted by abrupt shifts in perspective. As the pair grow closer, Joyland’s broad framework becomes a liability. The stories of the other family members, while interesting, tend to cramp the couple’s courtship. One longs to spend more time with Haider and Biba, digging into the details of their relationship. Biba and Haider’s interactions are some of the film’s most novel considerations of gender normativity and its pitfalls. Being with Biba forces Haider into unfamiliar terrain, which he can only navigate by being honest with himself. What kind of life has he let happen to him? The film also might have been enriched by further exploring what being with Haider means for Biba, who is on a similar search for selfhood.
Their relationship presents a refreshing challenge for the film: how to circumvent the ease of melodrama and reach for something more candid. Sadiq, with the help of DP Joe Saade, searches for the truth in close-ups, which clarify what words can only partially communicate. When Biba excitedly tells Haider about earning enough money for her surgeries, the frame stays close to their faces, which tell a deeper story. His muted response is a sign of how little he knows her.
As Haider gets closer to Biba, life at the Rana house begins to unravel. Another pregnancy threatens to shift the dynamics even more aggressively — a fate that some in the household would rather avoid. As Joyland heads toward its end, the film grows increasingly moving. Secrets and their attendant lies collapse under pressure. The weight of what’s left unsaid strangles interactions. The Ranas can no longer afford to be delusional — their survival depends on it.
