“Mohabbat da anjaam maut hai,” Haider says to Biba, as part of a joke she urges him to tell. It’s a conversation that plays out in Biba’s dank, neon-lit rooftop hideout; a place symbolic of a tortured human, brimming with an inner life that can’t quite pitch its tent out in the open. The joke isn’t much of a joke either, but a confession about the undetermined costs of yearning for something barred from crossing the aisle. Or walking the distance between Haider and Biba. Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, which won the subcontinent’s first Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year, finally releases on Mubi India and despite its origin and native vocabulary, speaks the universal language of longing and desire.
Set in inner-city Lahore, Joyland follows Haider played by Ali Junejo, the youngest son of a joint family overseen by Abba (Salmaan Peerzada). Married to the self-sufficient and forthright Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), Haider wears the look of a dishevelled, confused loner. A man unattended by both purpose or vice. He is somewhat overshadowed at home by his Alpha male elder brother, Saleem, a father of four daughters still trying to decorate the family tree with a son, at the unacknowledged cost of his submissive wife Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani). After Haider lands a job as a backup dancer in a cabaret show led by trans artist Biba (a stunning Alina Khan), he finds himself falling for her. Or at least the self-willing idea of her.
Haider, Mumtaz and Biba become this triangulated supposition of desire and ache that never quite meets the clarity of knowing. Desire might be liberating as a whim, as a fanciful re-imagination of reality, but it becomes stifling when it cannot be committed to sense or sensation. To not know, also means to perpetually await its becoming. The bodily twitch that can be summarised or the spiritual ecstasy that the faculties of art cannot yet explain. Biba’s exterior is as colourful as Mumtaz and Haider’s appears charred by the grating chains of social contract. All three of them are consigned to play someone they probably aren’t.
To this luminous, shattering meditation on unfulfilled desires, there is the backdrop of society’s annexation of attraction. The imposition that love whether straight or queer can’t be viewed through the lens of pluralism. Which is why a woman’s spontaneous orgasm is chastised, an ageing woman’s needy affection whiffed over with a patriarchal grunt. Joyland focuses on queer people, but it explores the queer nature of love itself; the fact that desire can bloom even in the soil that nourishes the resistance, between the chalice and the poison it holds, beyond the dictums of meaning, our bodies are jailed with.
Joyland has had a patchy, uneven journey to being released. Back in Pakistan it was banned a week before being released in theatres. Even though the furore that followed ensured a theatrical release, it has been shunned by certain regions in the country. In India, it has propped up at festivals but evaded a wider listing. Its release journey feels as combatively obscure and understated as its texture feels uniformly melancholic.
Directed and co-written by debutant Saim Sadiq, the film mercurially traverses Lahore’s boorish ruins, to unearth frames that last longer than the scenes they have been engineered to serve. Be it the sequence where Haider holds onto a giant cut-out of Biba, hurtling down a flyover or the thudding, commotional sequence of a terrified Biba dancing amidst a group of cussing, drunken men. Joyland beguiles you with imagery, confounds you with subtext and overwhelms with its performances. It’s a gut-punch landed with the staid, casual severity of a long-form tragedy. It takes a lifetime, the film says, to become that which you did not want to.
Joyland is also elevated by a shattering background score, provided by 23-year-old Abdullah Siddiqui. A marvellously flinty soundtrack, Siddiqui’s score quietly enriches the misery without ever turning into a strident tone. In fact, it’s incredible how the film plays out under the gallows and still holds onto this sobering enthusiasm about life, its puncturing beauty. There is a mournful charm to going about it as innocently yet doggedly as Haider does, as Biba has maybe always done and as some of us are waiting to do.
It’s possibly streaming’s gift to Indians that people can finally watch what is perhaps one of the finest films to come out of the subcontinent in recent memory. To a film culture trained on loud proclamations of straight narratives, Joyland serves as a poetic revision about the queer, and misunderstood nature of all desire. Desire that can’t be formalised as an atomic entity, or a material display of binary relationships. It is by definition, or for the lack of it, a shapeless, senseless thing. To merely experience it is to be transported to a place where the constitution of conformity, ceases to exist. It’s freeing, in every sense of the word. To the point that even if those scarred by it, wouldn’t want to remember it as anything other than a land full of joy. i.e. Joyland.
Joyland is now streaming on Mubi
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