Haider (Ali Junejo) hanging on for dear life lead by the imperious Biba (Alina Khan)
Joyland (2022)
Now playing in theaters
We’re living through a time of personal and societal crisis when it comes to gender and sexual identity, and I don’t imagine everyone sees this inflection point exactly the way I do.
But from what I’ve read and observed, it seems to me the most pressing psychological insight of the last half century is that sexuality runs along a continuum.
Is that a shock? Yes, actually for many it is. Because this contention has clashed with or undermined the two massive predominant categories “Male” and “Female”.
Joyland, from Pakistan, dares to take this rapidly expanding, in many places still coalescing, battle royal down to its family root.
Haider (Ali Junejo) lives with his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) in a cramped, crowded house in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city.
Lording it over the domicile is the patriarch, Rana (Salmaan Peerzada), who, though elderly and unable to walk, sits in his wheelchair as if it were a throne, hurling edicts and insults at his cowering family.
He’s most pleased, or perhaps least aggravated, with Haider’s older brother Saleem (Sameer Sohail), who, with his wife Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani), has four children, all girls.
Girls. Daughters. That’s a problem within traditional Pakistan. Society there still seems to ordain that a family ought to have a son.
Haider and Mumtaz remain childless. Haider tells his father that Mumtaz doesn’t want a child yet. Rana mockingly belittles his son: “Or is it that you can’t do it?”
Not only is Haider without progeny, but he’s also never had a job. He’s only been a cheerful caretaker and playmate for his nieces, completed chores and run errands for the family.
Mumtaz, uncomplaining, works as a makeup artist and urges her husband to find work that suits him. They’re affectionate, with an almost brother-and-sister sort of complicity, and she’s clearly in no hurry to be a parent.
Still, Haider, determined to man up, begs a friend for help finding a job, and is offered a most unexpected position as a dancer for a Bollywood-style nightclub act.
Never having danced, Haider is numb with fright. The act’s headliner, Biba (Alina Khan), is a hypnotic, fiercely talented trans woman and exotic dancer who dresses and behaves as a seductive female onstage and off.
The actors surely got their inspiration and energy from Sadiq’s colloquial, funny, piquant script, which relentlessly disputes the orthodoxy about what it means to be male or female, parent or child, lover or beloved.
Sadiq keeps his live-wire subject stubbornly in hand, and I have no doubt that his artistic will, or orneriness, can cross national borders and bridge cultural differences.
Biba hasn’t completed her sexual transition. She has “some operations” remaining to finalize the change but wants the world to respect her as a fully committed woman.
In his new job as one of the backup dancers for Biba’s act, Haider is at first a disaster, helplessly stiff and awkward.
But Biba militantly whips him into shape. Her act needs another dancer.
Under her withering instruction, Haider, to his astonishment, makes progress. Even the more seasoned dancers in the troupe admit that he’s developing some moves.
Of course, Haider lies to his family, saying he’s been hired as a stage manager. He tells Mumtaz the truth, and she agrees to keep his secret.
Absurd as this first job seems to him, Haider grows even more confused when the eroticism of the dance routines, fueled by Biba’s powerful hip swirls, lowers his inhibitions.
He and Biba fall hard for each other. They’re soon in a heated sexual relationship, unable to understand or stop it.
Haider and Biba’s surprise romance reveals dark undertones that will transform them both
Haider realizes that this is no fleeting crush. He’s in love with Biba.
It’s not sex that binds them so much as the shared sense of defiance that dance releases in them.
Haider feeds on, borrows, the courage it’s taken Biba to make her sexual transition. If she can be brave, he reasons, so can he.
But is this reasoning at all? Hasn’t eroticism loosened long-buried yearnings, not for a sexual identity — Biba as a woman, Haider as a father — but even more profoundly, for the right to be who one is?
And they’re not alone. It turns out that Mumtaz dives into erotic fantasies when, through binoculars at night, she spies on a neighbor in an alleyway pleasuring himself.
She moves her body in erotic syncopation with the stranger. Is this pulsing sensuality what she's missing with Haider?
Stunningly, lo and behold, Mumtaz becomes pregnant. Her listless coupling with her husband has finally produced an heir.
After a scan the doctor informs her that she’s carrying, wondrous to relate, a boy.
Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) learns the transforming news that she’s carrying a boy
It seems Haider will get his son after all.
The family is jubilant. And Mumtaz is left to wonder if this has been her assigned function all along, to bear a son.
Provocatively, this movie renders female gender in two forms, in two restless, unreconciled bodies.
Mumtaz suddenly feels her woman’s role — or is it an obligation? — is choking not liberating her.
At the same time, it’s precisely a woman’s identity that Biba desperately wants to adopt — or is it achieve?
Joyland’s writer-director Saim Sadiq, in his feature film debut, is issuing a cry not just from his homeland but to it – and to the wider world, to us, struggling with whipsawing sensual drives and contentions.
Our bodies are indivisible from ourselves; this movie won’t let us forget that.
Pakistanis and the rest of us are living through an indeterminate phase of history, trying to get, or keep, our bearings in the social whirlwind over sexuality.
In the eye of this storm, Sadiq’s moviemaking dazzles. All the actors give dense, detailed portraits of longing pitted against an unyielding social order.
The actors surely got their inspiration and energy from Sadiq’s colloquial, funny, piquant script, which relentlessly disputes the orthodoxy about what it means to be male or female, parent or child, lover or beloved.
Sadiq keeps his live-wire subject stubbornly in hand, and I have no doubt that his artistic will, or orneriness, can cross national borders and bridge cultural differences.
Family and its impositions can clearly, in Sadiq’s estimation, become subsumed with fear, hypocrisy and rage. His gaze is far from pitiless, but he spares no one.
That achingly mirrors the vicious agony – that’s the best word combination I’ve been able to come up with – that’s roiling America today.
From restricting abortion options, to “don't say gay”, to abridging trans rights.
Here’s a movie that tells us exactly where we are now, if we refuse to loosen our stranglehold on the multiple meanings that sexuality can encompass.
Joyland cries out the news of how steep the price of suppression can be. It calls on us to watch, weep and learn. Real lives, not the ones imposed on us, are being lost.