Joyland

Saim Sadiq’s Joyland begins with a game of tag: a man draped with a white bedsheet listens for his nieces’ suppressed giggles, his wandering arms outstretched as he attempts to catch them. Yet undercutting the tenderness of the way the pair eventually collapse together in raucous laughter, the camera hovers too close, and the sheet feels as much like an invisibility cloak as an innocent costume. We wonder why the first time we meet this man, Haider – brought to life with an extraordinarily sensitive performance by Ali Junejo – it’s as a ghost in his own home.

Off-screen, his sister-in-law’s water breaks. In a matter-of-fact voice, she tells Haider to bring the motorcycle around and informs her daughters (three of them, but she’s hoping this baby will be a son) that a neighbour will be over with lunch. Some odd and everyday machinery clicks into place: the birth of a child; the rules that define this family; husbands and wives; boys and girls. In this film we constantly see people through doorframes, their bodies boxed in by the house and its walls.

Joyland weaves a tapestry from the lives of a family in Lahore – or rather, contemplates what’s left behind when everything comes unravelled. Haider lives in a house where the preordained familiarity and simmering contradictions of patriarchal expectations co-exist. His wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), is free to continue the work she loves as a makeup artist because the unemployed Haider takes up housework alongside his sister-in-law. But when he finds a job at an erotic dance theatre, Mumtaz is forced to stay at home. Slowly, achingly, the machinery of the house begins to disintegrate.

At the theatre, soft-spoken Haider is a background dancer for an aspiring star named Biba (a commandingly beautiful Alina Khan), a trans woman whose fierce authenticity enthrals Haider for how opposed it is to the hesitant spectatorship of his own life. But the sensuous unfurling of Haider and Biba’s mutual attraction is just one thread the film patiently tugs at, in turn pulling at many more intertwined.

Pushed into an unwanted life of domestic labour and registering her husband’s slow estrangement, Mumtaz’s claustrophobia quietly floods the frame. The dynamic between them is exquisitely written; husband and wife whisper to one another with a genuine yet rueful affection that floats above the depths of what they wish they could confide in each other, if only the house of cards wouldn’t come tumbling down.

A beautifully intimate yet open-ended interrogation of the spaces its characters are forced to navigate, Sadiq’s intricate debut is a haunting elegy that mourns the deadly suffocation of desire, elegantly tracing how the liberation of men, women, cis, and trans people is always entangled. Named after an amusement park where Mumtaz and her sister-in-law swing high into the sky, neon lights punctuating their delighted, dizzy laughter in a rare moment of escapism and reprieve, Joyland swells with the silent pleas of bodies simply wanting to be seen, held, and free.

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