The Per­fect Can­di­date – first look review

A domes­tic fable that’s as gen­tle as a sum­mer breeze, Haifaa al-Mansour’s The Per­fect Can­di­date is a feath­erlight crowd pleas­er that takes aim at the every­day misog­y­ny that runs to the roots of Ara­bi­an soci­ety. It’s a film about grass­roots polit­i­cal action and its dis­con­tents, tak­ing time to explore the notion that people’s prej­u­dices often pre­vent them from mak­ing prac­ti­cal deci­sions that would help to improve their life. Often, the provider of sal­va­tion is the one that taints that sal­va­tion, so in the end, every­one los­es. Here it’s a dinky, depop­u­lat­ed munic­i­pal­i­ty in Dubai, but the point can be applied to oth­er ​“per­fect” can­di­dates in the west.

Mila Al Zahrani makes for a com­pelling and appeal­ing lead as per­ma-scowl­ing Maryam, a plan-speak­ing coun­try doc­tor whose desire to help the infirm of her com­mu­ni­ty is no sim­ple task. One key hur­dle is the fact that the road which leads to her clin­ic – which also hous­es the area’s only emer­gency room – isn’t paved, and so much of her job involves drag­ging patients across an ever-swelling bog for them to be able to receive their treatment.

And that’s only part of the fun. If the patient hap­pens to be male, an absurd nego­ti­a­tion then has to take place as to whether Maryam should be allowed to car­ry out her basic duties, what with her oper­at­ing in a posi­tion above her sta­tion as a woman. Can you save a per­son with­out touch­ing them, or look­ing at them? This is a ques­tion that al-Man­sour asks repeat­ed­ly across the film’s pep­py, if unde­mand­ing runtime.

Sto­ry mat­ters kick into gear with seg­ment of wacky screen­play hot-foot­ing that feels like its been sup­plant­ed from a 1980s Hol­ly­wood com­e­dy. It sees Maryam accidentally/​on pur­pose apply­ing to take part in her local coun­cil elec­tions, and then she stub­born­ly decides to take on the inef­fec­tu­al male incum­bent with the pow­er of pure pluck. Her two sis­ters muck in, and a mod­ern polit­i­cal mar­ket­ing cam­paign is born. Her father, mean­while, is crank­ing out Oud jams while tour­ing across the state, though feels sad that he can’t be there to wit­ness his bull­ish daughter’s schemes.

As men­tioned, this is all played in a reg­is­ter that’s so inef­fa­bly breezy that, even when some of the plot­ting is obvi­ous­ly schemat­ic, it’s not dif­fi­cult to turn the oth­er cheek. To a young audi­ence you have the easy joys of a media-savvy, no-shit woman suck­ing it to the patri­archy as best she can (and is appar­ent­ly immune to any blow­back for her repeat­ed social trans­gres­sions), and to an old­er audi­ence, it’s a satire of log­ic and jus­tice dying in an abyss of wan­ton idiocy.

Al-Man­sour and writ­ing part­ner Brad Nie­mann pep­per the sto­ry with solid­ly exe­cut­ed com­ic set pieces and musi­cal asides (Maryam comes from a fam­i­ly of wed­ding singers and is attempt­ing to break free of her local enter­tain­ment shack­les). But it’s all done for light tit­ters rather than big bel­ly laughs. And visu­al­ly, it’s a bit of a non-starter, with the cam­era pret­ty much just point­ed at the actors as they do their thing. But it’s a charm­ing lit­tle tri­fle which ends up sug­gest­ing that some­times, if you lose the small-scale bat­tle, you may unknow­ing­ly win the big­ger war. Expect an Amer­i­can remake very soon.