Joyland, a film featuring a traditional Lahori family coming in contact with a transgender woman, laboured through several funding sources, development labs etc around the world over a number of years. It could have fallen into countless traps.

Some would have been obvious — exoticisms of various kinds to appease the global gaze — some less so, e.g. camp aesthetics, or an excessive insistence on “countering stereotypes” as per the latest fashion. However, unlike most other works in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ Cannes sidebar, whose Jury Prize it deservedly won, Joyland falls in no traps whatsoever.

In showing a household with two brothers, their families and their old father, its main focus is far from conventional: the meeker brother, Haider. Mumtaz, his wife, works as a hairdresser, and is the breadwinner and the central force of the couple — until her shy, acquiescent, clumsy-ish husband finds a job… as a background dancer for a transgender artist, Biba.

Both dense and fragmented thanks to the skilful use of colour and the meticulous, in-depth layering of nearly every shot (aptly served by an unusually narrow 4:3 ratio), domestic spaces reflect an extended family that is both cohesive and fractured, with that dichotomy being revealed more and more as plot complications arise.

Saim Sadiq’s Joyland has brought Pakistan on the map of the major festival scene once again after a long-standing, puzzling absence

There is no shortage of formal brilliance in Joyland, yet in cinema there is something that matters more than any visuals and any style, perhaps even more than action itself: tone. Here is where Joyland turns out to be truly stunning, consistently suffused as it is with a quietly-paced melancholic mood, effectively keeping at bay the ever-sneaky demons of melodrama, limiting comedy to frequent, well-placed, discreet giggles and a few bitter smiles.

It is the kind of melancholy that comes from knowing that the chance to break away from one’s preordained roles is so close, right here and now, and yet, impossibly out of reach. Not even the family’s patriarch, inflexible without much conviction, is immune to this feeling.

Cinema is at its best when it makes us notice those paradoxically invisible things that are too obvious for us to pay attention to, and Joyland excels at this even more so than it does in setting a melancholic tone. In Joyland, queerness is not exceptional. Queer spaces (the dancing theatre) are unceasingly connected with domestic spaces through Haider’s metro journeys back and forth; therein, he and Biba share a tenderness which is not so far removed from the tenderness of his own family life.

The neon lights of Biba’s theatre and those of Lahore’s Joyland amusement park may be just different permutations of the same human matter. If gender fluidity plays any role in Joyland, it’s because it is always already there in the first place: whether we acknowledge it or not, porosity between gender roles is often the most ordinary of things in any home.

It takes no more than a simple goat-slaughtering scene, right after the incipit: two quick close-ups, and our perception of Haider as the male in the couple is challenged, without anything particularly abnormal having occurred. But while Haider’s murkily sensitive, all-too-common hesitant masculinity is squarely in the foreground, the film does not neglect Mumtaz and her own problematic condition as a wife.

Her condition can be, sadly, summed up by the key line of possibly the entire film, that within her own household, she occupies the uncomfortable position of being “transparent, visibly.”

Finally fully visibly, 42 years after Jamil Dehlavi’s Blood of Hussain, Pakistan is now on the map of the major festival scene again, after a long-standing, puzzling absence. After the international recognition gained by Saim Sadiq and his remarkable cast (among others: Ali Junejo, Rasti Farooq, Alina Khan, Sarwat Gilani, Salmaan Peerzada, Sohail Sameer and Sania Saeed), the way is now hopefully open for other projects from this part of the world to cleverly, successfully challenge the doxa of so-called “World Cinema”.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 5th, 2022