The right way to feel love, and the right way to feel part of a family, are the insoluble difficulties at the heart of this mysterious, sad and tender movie from Pakistan, a drama brimming with life and novelistic detail, directed by the first-time film-maker Saim Sadiq. He has been rewarded with the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes, an official entry-shortlisting for the Academy Awards (though not a final nomination), and derision and censorship from Pakistan’s sterner political classes for his film’s supposed sexual immorality.
It is the story of an extended family in Lahore. Rana Amanullah, or “Abba” (Salmaan Peerzada), is an elderly widower in a wheelchair who presides over a large clan in a cramped apartment, near an amusement park called Joyland. One son, Saleem (Sohail Sameer) is married to Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani), they now have four lively young daughters but yearn to give Abba a grandson.
Abba is even more disappointed in his other boy, Haider (Ali Junejo), who has no child at all, and is unemployed while his smart, resourceful wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) is the one that works; she is a talented makeup artist. The crisis arrives when Haider gets a job at a local erotic dance theatre, assuring Abba that he is the “manager”. In fact, he is a backing dancer for the show’s transgender star Biba, played by trans performer Alina Khan, with whom Haider falls deeply in love. There is a glorious shot of Haider transporting a huge poster image of Biba home on his bike: a surreal image of erotic enchantment. He doesn’t understand his feelings, and in fact Biba comes to be angry at him for not working out what he is and what he wants. Yet his new lucrative work means that Mumtaz is pressured into giving up the job she loves and then becomes pregnant – with a boy, suddenly making her and the once despised Haider Abba’s favourites. As Haider swoons with hidden pleasure, Mumtaz secretly descends into depression and panic.
This is a movie about people who find their inner lives and sense of themselves don’t match up to what is expected of them. Their feeling of wrongness is part of what they have to suppress, from day to day. Mumtaz’s erotic needs are denied; poor Abba himself can hardly admit to himself that he is deeply moved by the attentions of a respectable neighbour lady, Fayyaz (Sania Saeed), who looks after him when he wets himself and even (entirely platonically) falls asleep at their apartment and stays over, to the rage of her self-righteously religious son. Then of course there is Biba: tough, yet insecure, always having to fight for her status at the theatre, worried about money, and worried about her relationship with Haider. Should she allow herself to fall in love with this married man whose secret desires may not be precisely what he thinks they are, and not what Biba needs?
Perhaps most poignantly of all, Haider does not stop loving Mumtaz, but cannot give her the future and the social identity she deserves. Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.
• Joyland is released on 24 February in UK cinemas.
