Joyland Review: Saim Sadiq’s Sublime Tale of Love, Loss, and Prejudice

At the heart of Joyland are two love stories that cinema has never portrayed before, and they’re intersecting ones that are both queer in entirely different ways. First there’s the one between Haider (Ali Junejo) and his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), which is full of reciprocity and tenderness, and serves as a quiet act of defiance in a Pakistan where men and women must be oppositional cogs in the machinery of the heterosexual family. Then there’s the one that Haider stumbles upon, despite the age-old demands that try to neuter an individual’s ability to act on their own desires instead of parroting socially imposed ones.

This latter love story, which is queer in much more obvious ways than the first, involves Biba (Alina Khan), a feisty trans woman and erotic dancer who, like so many, is stuck between courting and rebuking the very male gaze that makes trans life unlivable. She’s looking for backup dancers to perform alongside her as an intermission act to a cisgender dancer’s main performance at a Lahore cabaret—and it’s a search that draws Haider into her orbit.

In a tacit agreement with Mumtaz, Haider has been jobless for a while: So that she can work as a make-up artist, he stays home doing domestic chores and taking care of his older brother Saleem’s (Sameer Sohail) children—and to Saleem’s and their father’s (Salmaan Peerzada) shame. Dancing tends not to be the strength of men like Haider who’ve had to turn their bodies into a sort of impenetrable armor to keep their queerness—in the most general sense of the word—from seeping out and exposing them as something other than yet another diligent soldier of the patriarchy. Lucky for Haider that Mumtaz appreciates that “queer” sensibility of his—as evinced by a scene where he can’t bring himself to slice open a goat’s throat and she happily does it for him, as well as a beautiful and unexpected flashback where we see that he wasn’t going to go through with their arranged marriage without secretly asking for her consent.

Haider ends up getting the job as part of Biba’s dance group, despite being completely stiff in his audition. He also ends up falling in love with her. And because of this love, depicted by director and co-writer Saim Sadiq with a mesmerizing gentleness, Haider is finally able to loosen up. He becomes more nimble and confident as he moves his body on stage, even suggesting new choreographies to Biba, which result in a particularly ecstatic dance sequence at the cabaret, entirely illuminated by the flashlights from the patrons’ cellphones.

Perhaps as a result of that loosening, Haider is surprisingly not paranoid about being found out that his new job isn’t as a theater manager, like he told his family, or that he’s working for, let alone having romantic encounters with, a trans woman. He’s so enthralled by Biba’s presence—her beauty, her audacity, her charisma—that he follows her around like a puppy dog, barely anxious about his fellow dancers’ teasing or the possibility of public scandal.

When a woman sitting next to Biba on the subway, which is segregated by gender, tells her to move seats, Haider parks his body between the women, as if he were Biba’s armor now. Haider’s recklessness about his relationship to Biba being found out never feels farfetched. And that’s because within the logic of the film, his newfound capacity to own up to his desire despite the costs is perfectly understood as one of those delightful things that love makes possible.

A newly liberated man, Haider drives across town on his motorcycle with a gigantic cardboard cutout of his beloved Biba posing and staring at the camera. The sequence serves a particular narrative function, but the symbolic and poetic echoes that it creates are astonishing. Alleging a scheduling conflict, Biba says that she can’t pick up the cutout from the shop where it was made, which prompts Haider to volunteer to take the cutout to his family home. And after taking it to the roof of the home with Mumtaz’s help, they place a piece of white fabric over it, suggestive of a veil as it waves like a flag in the mind, almost inviting the world to look at the cutout.

This rather unlikely collaboration between Haider and Mumtaz positions Biba’s effigy on top of the city as if to oversee, and perhaps laugh at, the way all of its citizens seem to find solace from the suffocating strictness of cis-heterosexual monogamy in its shadows or loopholes: from Haider’s father’s late-night liaison with a widower neighbor (Sania Saeed) to the clandestine or roundabout ways in which Mumtaz and Saleem’s wife, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani), go about pleasuring themselves. Certainly not with the aid of their husbands. Mumtaz, for instance, watches a stranger masturbate in the street with a pair of binoculars, pressing her vagina against a piece of furniture in the dark. And the bouncy movements of a theme park ride prompt a euphoric Nucchi to ask Mumtaz at one point: “When was the last time we came?”

While the film presents Haider as gauche, it also suggests that his clumsiness is a result of his inability to express his desire. He may begin the film wallowing in awkwardness, but as soon as he finds a reason to grow out of it, he does. And, thankfully, Sadiq foregrounds all sorts of poetic moments that illuminate this man’s awakening and the ways that the film’s love stories intersect, instead of insisting on some grand moral lesson about tolerance or diversity.

Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor. And not only because Haider’s relationship to Mumtaz is just as multi-dimensional as his love with Biba, but because the latter love story gives rise to a series of beautiful dialogues. When Haider comes over to Biba’s place, enchanted but still afraid to kiss her, she berates him for his hesitation. And in a kind of scolding of the cowardice of every straight man who chooses the convenience, or the barrenness, of tradition over the possibility of happiness with a trans woman, she tells him, “You know, last night a young Chinese man came back after making a trip to Mars. And you can’t even hold a pretty girl’s hand?”

Never has a film paid this sort of attention to the subtleties of love between a man and a trans woman. The way bodies, their differences, and the choreographies between them end up getting in the way, as if bumping against old scripts about where limbs need to go and when. The way one gesture during sex, at once so small and yet so immense, can cause everything to collapse.

The film could have easily given way to a reparative, albeit implausible, happy ending. But Joyland’s dignity is in its commitment to realism. Love between straight men and trans women is impossible, Sadiq and co-screenwriter Maggie Briggs seem to be saying. But at least cinema has finally captured the magical instance when a straight man is so enthralled by a trans woman that he convinces himself he could romantically commit to her. He’s bound to, of course, come to his senses and put an end to the affair by either ghosting her, or wanting much more than what she can give. But not before he allows her to dream that that this one time, maybe, it will actually last. How many love stories unlived because of men’s ability to build spaceships that go to Mars and their pathetic inability to hold a pretty girl’s hand because she’s trans?

Joyland lingers on the improbable moment, however brief, where a straight man dares to imagine, and live out, pleasure as an act without the need for social consent. A moment where a trans woman becomes something other, something better, to him than an irresistible image. A moment, a public one, where a man looks at a trans woman and considers love, not instant gratification. A moment where he dares to risk something that she has never had a choice not to risk. But this isn’t her first time at the rodeo. She knows exactly how everything ends.