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Joyland Movie Review

Joyland is a 2022 Pakistani drama film directed by Saim Sadiq and starring Ali Junejo and Alina Khan. It’s a flawed, but highly provocative and honest movie.

One day, Haider finds work as a dancer in a cabaret. He falls in love with one of the star dancers, Biba, a transgender woman. For her part, his wife Mumtaz finds it hard to bear his less and less free life. Pakistan is a predominantly Muslim country, and as such, it is extremely patriarchal and unforgiving in its social expectations. Thus, getting a movie that deconstructs those gender roles from this country is in and of itself an important political act, which resulted in it being banned in its native Punjab.

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Rare are films that deal with this subject in such an honest, daring manner. For instance, there is this powerful sequence where it is pretty obvious that the male protagonist wishes for his transgender lover to be dominant in bed, which she refuses and kicks him out of the house. This scene is important for hinting at the highly complicated psychology and questionable sexuality behind those persons who are sexually attracted to transgender people.

The movie also is crucial in depicting everybody suffering from these rigid roles in society, including the wife character and her entire family. My only issue here came in the third act as I found the ending overly melodramatic and simply unsatisfactory. It was needlessly cruel toward the wife and overly forgiving toward the protagonist. Whenever a movie brushes aside cheating as a minor issue such as this one, I am bound to be offended. Everybody here leads an unhappy life for sure, but the plight of the women in these marriages needed to have been better highlighted.

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Alina Khan is a transgender actress herself, which made for a brilliant casting choice that made the character herself so real and grounded. Admittedly, Biba was at times borderline unlikable in her domineering and tough exterior, but depicting a trans woman this way instead of a victim was crucial in making her distinctly different from many others. Ali Junejo is fine as Haider, though the character is somewhat underwritten. The scenes between the two are sexually intriguing, but hardly electric as they are somewhat tame by Western standards.

Joyland is surprisingly well directed by Saim Sadiq, a first time director. His work here is particularly strong for somebody who is this young. The editing and pacing are also very good while the cinematography and the overall production and costume design evoke the rich vibrancy of music and culture of Pakistan wonderfully. The film’s dialogue is impressively realistic and nuanced while the psychology behind each character’s motivations is complex. I just wish that the ending were less melodramatic.

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