My Mirror column:
Two disturbing 2017 films — one set amidst Norwegian Pakistanis, the other among Russian Jews — present gripping portraits of young women fighting to not be sacrificed at the altar of community.
A teenager brought up in Norway is suddenly transplanted to a Pakistani small town and finds herself the subject of prurient attention. “Why have you come here?” hiss her headscarf-wearing new classmates. Aware that she is on display, the new arrival tamely offers up what she thinks is the good-girl response expected of her: “I’ve come to learn about my parents’ culture”. But what’s flung back at her is a stinging accusation: “Not your parents’ culture! Your culture!”
It is a relatively minor moment in what is a film full of harrowing scenes. But that misrecognition goes to the heart of Iram Haq’s What Will People Say: What happens when your parents’ culture doesn’t feel like your own? One answer – a wrenching, difficult one – is that sometimes, then, your parents don’t feel like your own.
Haq’s film stars Ekavali Khanna and Adil Hussain as Pakistani immigrants who are happy to educate their daughter Nisha (the affecting Maria Mozhdah) and even imagine a career for her – until they come to suspect that she is leading the life of the Norwegian teenager: dancing, drinking, dating. At home, she obeys when told to wear a jacket over a revealing blouse; she serves snacks to the aunties; she pretends her texting exchanges are all about school work. But Nisha is indeed leading that life, just secretly. All hell breaks loose when her father discovers a boy in her room.
The film paints a depressing picture of the Pakistani community in exile, but it doesn’t ring false. If you’ve grown up in South Asia, you don’t need to be told that Haq based her film on a traumatic episode from her own Pakistani-Norwegian childhood to be convinced by Adil Hussain’s finely wrought transformation from loving, indulgent father to uncontrollably violent patriarch. The father who proudly displayed his academically bright daughter now feels only burning shame on her behalf: “Sab log hum par hans rahe hain.”
The community’s solution is to send her ‘home’ — to a country she has never lived in. Under the tutelage of her stern Phuphi (the always effective Sheeba Chaddha), Nisha learns to roll rotis, drape a dupatta and keep her head down. But the sexual awakening that was sought to be crushed in Norway happens instead in Pakistan, with worse effects. Now the only way to deal with such a wayward daughter is to marry her off, to trade her freedom in for the family’s honour.
Haq’s film was shown at the Dharamshala Film Festival in early November.
At the International Film Festival of India a few weeks later, I saw a stunning Russian film called Closeness in which, too, a young woman is sought to be clamped into conformity. Set in the late 1990s in the filmmaker’s hometown of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus, Kantemir Balagov’s film won the International Critics’ Prize for best film in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. It centres on the tomboyish Ilana (the superb Darya Zhovner), who likes nothing better than helping her mechanic father fix cars. But as in Haq’s film, a young woman of a certain age must start behaving a certain way, and it is her mother who lays down those rules. In a celebratory family scene with strong echoes of WWPS, a sulky Ilana is made to change her overalls for a dress and help her mother in the kitchen.
Ilana is also carrying on a clandestine affair with a boy from the town’s Kabardian community, which has a tense relationship with the Jewish community to which she belongs. Where Haq largely uses marked shifts in body language to register the contradictions of her heroine’s life, Balagov unsettles us by alternating between the raw, barely-lit seediness of Ilana’s secret backstreet life and the family’s domestic interiors, whose rich rusts and deep greens have the dramatic shadows of a Caravaggio painting.
Nalchik’s Jews are different from Norway’s Pakistanis, but Ilana’s clash with her parents resonates strongly with Nisha’s. In one exceptional scene, Ilana’s mother instructs her angrily, “You won’t be with him. He’s not from our tribe.” Ilana’s response is fierce and wordless — she puts her hand to her mouth and produces a long ululation, mocking her mother’s use of the word ‘tribe’. Unlike WWPS, the crisis in Closeness is not bought on by Ilana’s sexuality – but her insistence on displaying proof it certainly causes the sensation she intends it to.
These are not films that will be viewed as similar, and indeed they are far apart in pitch and tenor. But both produce for us the disturbing figure of the young woman forced to recognise that she is not quite as human as her brothers; that her social value lies not in what she might desire —but only in who can be made to desire her.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Dec 2017.
Two disturbing 2017 films — one set amidst Norwegian Pakistanis, the other among Russian Jews — present gripping portraits of young women fighting to not be sacrificed at the altar of community.
A teenager brought up in Norway is suddenly transplanted to a Pakistani small town and finds herself the subject of prurient attention. “Why have you come here?” hiss her headscarf-wearing new classmates. Aware that she is on display, the new arrival tamely offers up what she thinks is the good-girl response expected of her: “I’ve come to learn about my parents’ culture”. But what’s flung back at her is a stinging accusation: “Not your parents’ culture! Your culture!”
It is a relatively minor moment in what is a film full of harrowing scenes. But that misrecognition goes to the heart of Iram Haq’s What Will People Say: What happens when your parents’ culture doesn’t feel like your own? One answer – a wrenching, difficult one – is that sometimes, then, your parents don’t feel like your own.
Haq’s film stars Ekavali Khanna and Adil Hussain as Pakistani immigrants who are happy to educate their daughter Nisha (the affecting Maria Mozhdah) and even imagine a career for her – until they come to suspect that she is leading the life of the Norwegian teenager: dancing, drinking, dating. At home, she obeys when told to wear a jacket over a revealing blouse; she serves snacks to the aunties; she pretends her texting exchanges are all about school work. But Nisha is indeed leading that life, just secretly. All hell breaks loose when her father discovers a boy in her room.
The film paints a depressing picture of the Pakistani community in exile, but it doesn’t ring false. If you’ve grown up in South Asia, you don’t need to be told that Haq based her film on a traumatic episode from her own Pakistani-Norwegian childhood to be convinced by Adil Hussain’s finely wrought transformation from loving, indulgent father to uncontrollably violent patriarch. The father who proudly displayed his academically bright daughter now feels only burning shame on her behalf: “Sab log hum par hans rahe hain.”
The community’s solution is to send her ‘home’ — to a country she has never lived in. Under the tutelage of her stern Phuphi (the always effective Sheeba Chaddha), Nisha learns to roll rotis, drape a dupatta and keep her head down. But the sexual awakening that was sought to be crushed in Norway happens instead in Pakistan, with worse effects. Now the only way to deal with such a wayward daughter is to marry her off, to trade her freedom in for the family’s honour.
Haq’s film was shown at the Dharamshala Film Festival in early November.
At the International Film Festival of India a few weeks later, I saw a stunning Russian film called Closeness in which, too, a young woman is sought to be clamped into conformity. Set in the late 1990s in the filmmaker’s hometown of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus, Kantemir Balagov’s film won the International Critics’ Prize for best film in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. It centres on the tomboyish Ilana (the superb Darya Zhovner), who likes nothing better than helping her mechanic father fix cars. But as in Haq’s film, a young woman of a certain age must start behaving a certain way, and it is her mother who lays down those rules. In a celebratory family scene with strong echoes of WWPS, a sulky Ilana is made to change her overalls for a dress and help her mother in the kitchen.
Ilana is also carrying on a clandestine affair with a boy from the town’s Kabardian community, which has a tense relationship with the Jewish community to which she belongs. Where Haq largely uses marked shifts in body language to register the contradictions of her heroine’s life, Balagov unsettles us by alternating between the raw, barely-lit seediness of Ilana’s secret backstreet life and the family’s domestic interiors, whose rich rusts and deep greens have the dramatic shadows of a Caravaggio painting.
Nalchik’s Jews are different from Norway’s Pakistanis, but Ilana’s clash with her parents resonates strongly with Nisha’s. In one exceptional scene, Ilana’s mother instructs her angrily, “You won’t be with him. He’s not from our tribe.” Ilana’s response is fierce and wordless — she puts her hand to her mouth and produces a long ululation, mocking her mother’s use of the word ‘tribe’. Unlike WWPS, the crisis in Closeness is not bought on by Ilana’s sexuality – but her insistence on displaying proof it certainly causes the sensation she intends it to.
These are not films that will be viewed as similar, and indeed they are far apart in pitch and tenor. But both produce for us the disturbing figure of the young woman forced to recognise that she is not quite as human as her brothers; that her social value lies not in what she might desire —but only in who can be made to desire her.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Dec 2017.
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