joy land | Vibrant portrait of a man like no other

After finding a job in a cabaret, a young Pakistani man living with his wife in a house in Lahore, where his brother’s demanding family also lives, falls under the spell of a trans magazine leader. How can you resist this irresistible call for freedom?

As his first feature film, filmmaker Saim Sadiq offers a “totally fictional, but autobiographical” story. Understand by this that this work is the fruit of an amalgam of things felt and experienced since childhood by a young man who had never been manly enough, he said, to live in a patriarchal society, let alone respond to his requirements.

Yet this is what Haider (Ali Junejo) resigns himself to doing, a young man suffering from his family’s dissatisfaction with him, particularly that of the patriarch, who summons him to make a “man” of himself by finding a job and becoming a father. In this stifling dynamic, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), Haider’s wife, is the only one to look at him lovingly, no doubt appreciating the more sensitive character of this man like no other. The filmmaker makes this young woman a superb character. It is also she who earns the living of the couple while the husband is unemployed.

Built around a burgeoning love story between the young man and Biba (Alina Khan), the leader of trans cabaret reviews where he has finally found a little job and for whom he cannot help feeling feelings, the story is based on the eternal dilemma between tradition and modernity. And subtly mixes intimate and social concerns.

Avoiding the expected clichés, Saim Sadiq exposes the complexity of the feeling of love and refuses any Manichaeism in his story. The illustration of the entertainment world remains rather sober, despite its inherently flamboyant character. But make no mistake. joyland also has an eminently political aspect, and this scene where Haider transports on his motorbike a huge billboard of Biba in the streets of Lahore constitutes in this respect a nice wink. Although the two films have nothing to do with each other, we will also be tempted to establish a link with Closea feature film directed by a filmmaker from the same generation (Lukas Dhont), who also questions the consequences that the codes of masculinity have on those who cannot correspond to them.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard section and the Queer Palm prize – a first for a Pakistani production at Cannes –, joyland is showing in its original version with French subtitles.

Indoors

Drama

joyland

Saim Sadiq

With Ali Junejo, Alina Khan, Sania Saeed

2:06 a.m.

7.5/10