The directorial debut of Saim Sadiq, Joyland is a gorgeous, heartrending LGBTQ drama from Pakistan. Told in Urdu and Punjabi, the film’s subject is the Rana family, a close-knit group living under one roof headed up by a stern father who, despite having four granddaughters, is keen for his two sons and their wives to provide him with at least one boy to carry the family name. Younger son Haider (Ali Junejo) and his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) are somewhat atypical of the country’s idealised family structure – Haider a stay-at-home uncle helping his sister-in-law raise his nieces, while his more independent wife goes to work.
Things change drastically when Haider gets a job as an erotic back-up dancer at a theatre catering to men – fibbing to his dad about his role – and Mumtaz is forced to stay at home instead. Haider then develops feelings he can’t quite understand for his boss, Biba: a transgender dancer played by Alina Khan, the first trans woman to play a lead role in a Pakistani film.
Primarily a domestic drama, Joyland is brought above the televisual by the slightly grainy quality of its film and square aspect ratio, giving its otherwise naturalistic performances and locations an almost dreamy quality that captures the dusty heat of the country’s second-most populated city. Characters are sometimes cut off at the bottom or sides of the frame during conversations, or obscured by the world around them behind furniture, walls, doors or parts of buildings. Sometimes they’re shot from behind so we can only see the back of their head. These physical barriers preventing us from fully reading expressions – an actor’s main tool – mirror much of the inner turbulence happening inside minds or behind closed doors. Key details are withheld from the audience, just as the characters withhold their private lives, innermost thoughts and deepest desires from each other.
Joyland’s title (taken from a theme park) is semi-ironic: happiness for non-conformists like Haider, Mumtaz and Biba isn’t a constant geography to settle down in, but snatched moments of fleeting bliss, like finding an oasis in a desert. Much of the film is also about the act of watching and being watched but rarely being seen. In its final moments, in fact, Haider and the camera become estranged, him disappearing into the horizon as though shrinking, facelessly, out of this world.
Gender, sexuality, lust, loss, fulfillment, and liberation are all themes and ideas Sadiq investigates with an accepting, sensitive, and feminist lens. Biba is incredibly charismatic, her fiery personality burning with either intense joy, anger, or sadness, while Farooq’s Mumtaz deserves similar praise for being more inhibited; her slow mental decline is like watching the light go out in an otherwise bright star.
Much like its characters fighting to be seen and heard, Joyland was almost suffocated by the Pakistani government for what one right-wing senator described as “a direct attack on our beliefs”, referring mainly to the “glamourising of transgenders in Pakistan” in relation to Islam. As such, despite huge success at international film festivals last year, the film was banned from domestic release, prompting a social media campaign, #ReleaseJoyland. Eventually, the ban was partially overturned, but it was still passed over by significant festivals in that part of the world.
And what a shame: not only is Joyland a magnificent example of LGBTQ+ and feminist filmmaking, but it’s also a colourful, emotional, and enlightening window onto a Pakistan international audiences may have never seen before.
Dir. Saim Sadiq (15, 126 mins)
Joyland is in cinemas now.
words HANNAH COLLINS
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