Haider is a failure. Or, at least, he knows he is a failure in the eyes of his highly traditional Pakistani Muslim family. He barely has a role in their home in Lahore, and most of what he does is serve as babysitter for his nieces. Every time there’s a man’s job assigned to him by his father, the soft-spoken Haider will inevitably fail, and then try to fade into the background. The closest he can come to standing up to them is a lie about his new job: He’s not, as he tells them, the manager for a burlesque troupe, but a dancer.
Watery-eyed and drowning in contrition, Junejo finds a touching, tragic inner life to Haider’s passivity: But in Urdu and Punjabi observational tragedy Joyland first-time director Saim Sadiq isn’t interested in simply telling a story of sexual and social liberation. It’s all too common in films of internal conflict to only concentrate on the needs and fate of the central figure. However, Sadiq depicts the ramifications of Haider’s actions and inactions, most especially on his wife, Mumtaz. In a quietly transfixing performance, Farooq captures her internalized rage at being forced into the background as her husband finally starts bringing home the paycheck, her highly skilled medical job now inessential even if Haider’s career is so shameful that he can’t even mention it around the neighbors.
And then there’s Biba (Khan), the trans dancer who works the intermission at the show but sees herself as the star, with whom Haider becomes fixated and eventually enamored. But her plight is merely one more tile in the mosaic that Sadiq builds to reveal the cost paid by all to live in a hidebound and traditionalist society. The initial instinct to revile family patriarch Rana Amanullah (Peerzada) is undercut as he is forced to sacrifice his little bit of happiness for the sake of propriety. No one is safe, no one can see a path to happiness: Even Fayyaz (Saeed), the compassionate neighbor who cares for Rana a little too much, has to give up her happiness.
The Cannes 2022 Jury Prize- and Queer Palm-winning Joyland has been labeled as an attack on a patriarchal society, but that’s oddly reductionist: There are too many paths to and reasons for the inevitable catastrophes that are built up by the midpoint. As he lays out the pattern of tragedy, Sadiq displays a trace of the “big picture through a small lens” aspects of the French New Wave, somewhere between the sociological steaminess of early Jean-Luc Godard and the compassionate distant observations of Éric Rohmer. When the final tile is inevitably, predictably, calmly laid, it doesn’t make the tragedy any less haunting.
This article appears in May 5 • 2023.
