By Kenneth Turan
FILM: Wadjda
CAST: Waad Mohamed, Reem Abdullah, Abdullrahman al-Gohani
DIRECTION: Haifaa al-Mansour
The first feature to be shot in Saudi Arabia, and directed by a woman, Wadjda is a remarkable film twice over. We are fortunate to have it for both of those reasons, but it’s hard not to wish the result was even better.
While the uniqueness of the film’s Riyadh setting and the nature of Wadjda’s depictions of life for women are thoroughly involving, the actual plotline of a 10-year-old girl’s determination to own a bicycle can be as standard as it sounds.
Given the circumstances of Wadjda’s creation, that result may not be surprising.
Writer-director Haifaa al-Mansour has said she made the film not because she burned to tell this particular story but rather because “I wanted to give the intellectual debate a human face. ... It was important to me that the story was an accurate portrayal of the situation of women in Saudi Arabia”. The bigger picture was the driving force, and that is what Wadjda is best at conveying.
So even though the film’s through-line follows young Wadjda (Waad Mohamed) as she gets fixated on the idea of owning a bike in a culture that frowns on that activity for girls, the character is less interesting in herself than as a conduit through which we see the severe difficulties faced by her mother (Saudi TV actress Reem Abdullah) and other girls who are friends at school and have more serious problems.
Although Wadjda’s parents clearly care for each other, their marriage has not produced a son and the norms of society, not to mention the influence of his mother, are pressuring the father (Sultan Assaf) to take a second wife. Wadjda’s mother is far from happy about this (“I’m the original brand,” she says to him. “Why are you leaving for an imitation?”), but in this world, her options are severely limited.
Also disturbing are situations where Wadjda becomes tangentially involved in at her strict state-run girls’ school, headed by the unbending Miss Hussa (Ahd).
Wadjda’s determination to flaunt convention and get a bike so she can race her neighbourhood pal Abdullah (Abdullrahman Gohani) is more generic than involving, especially compared with the more accomplished neo-realist films (the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta and Jafar Panahi’s Offside) the director has mentioned as inspirations.
It also doesn’t help that Wadjda herself is a cliche rebel, a headstrong, borderline bratty type whose smart-mouth attitude is supposed to charm us with its spunk but can also irritate by its rudeness. A little of this goes a long way, especially in a film that has such a leisurely pace.
That said, it is important to remember that Wadjda is made by a first-time feature director. Her script does contain a number of unexpected elements, and it gets stronger as it goes along. Drawbacks and all, it’s heartening to have Wadjda around. - Los Angeles Times/MCT
A journey of discovery
FILM: Ida
CAST: Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik, Jerzy Trela
DIRECTION: Pawel Pawlikowski
Spare, haunting, uncompromising, Ida is a film of exceptional artistry whose emotions are as potent and persuasive as its images are indelibly beautiful.
The first film in his native Poland by the gifted Britain-based director Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida is by design simultaneously simple and complex, timely and outside of time.
It tells the story of one specific young woman’s search for identity in 1962, and in so doing effortlessly brings in issues roiling contemporary Poland as well as themes of trauma and redemption that are as old as the ancient Greeks.
Pawlikowski’s previous films include the too little seen Last Resort and My Summer of Love, Emily Blunt’s breakout role. Collaborating with co-writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, he is working here in such a pared-down but explosive fashion, with not a frame wasted, that Ida’s brief 80-minute length is sufficient to make a piercing impression.
From its opening sequence of a young novitiate named Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) in her rural convent, the beauty and serenity of Ida’s images all but overpower us.
Shot by Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenkczekicz in black and white and the classic 1.33:1 format with a camera that rarely moves, the compositions are often arresting.
Just days away from taking her vows, 18-year-old Anna is about to be cast out of her peaceful realm. It seems that Anna’s aunt, a woman named Wanda Grosz, has asked to see her, and the Mother Superior mandates a visit. Immediately.
We meet Wanda (a commanding Agata Kulesza) before Anna does, and two more different women could not be imagined.
A chain smoker and a bit of a libertine, Wanda, we gradually learn, has significant ties to Poland’s Communist hierarchy.
Wanda is so different from Anna, the older woman almost turns around and doesn’t introduce herself to the naive young person who waits for her at the agreed-upon bus station rendezvous. But the news she feels compelled to impart is too critical for her to turn away.
Taking Anna home, Wanda sits her down and tells her about her parents and their well-kept secret.
At first Wanda, whose sister was Ida’s mother, is content to leave it at that. Cynical, jittery, troubled, she would be more comfortable if Ida went on her way. But now that she has seen her niece again, part of Wanda can’t let her go. She shows the younger woman photographs of the mother and family she has never known. When Ida asks where her parents were buried, Wanda tells her brusquely, “they have no graves. No one knows where the bodies are.”
For reasons that have as much to do with her own issues, her own past, as they do with Ida, Wanda determines to take her old Wartburg car on a joint road trip with the novitiate to find those lost graves. Together they confront different aspects of Poland’s past, ghosts from the Nazi era and the Stalinist one, and what transpires when they push past the inevitable resistance changes both of them profoundly.
Though strands of plot touch contemporary chords, there is nothing overtly ideological about Ida. Its concerns are predominantly personal and emotional, like watching what transpires when the two women pick up a hitchhiking musician named Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik) on the way to a desultory gig.
It is Trzebuchowska’s face, and her character’s situation, her existential and practical journey, that hold our interest in Ida. - By Kenneth Turan/Los Angeles Times/MCT
A serious issue wrapped in thriller trappings
By Leslie Felperin
FILM: Honour
CAST: Aiysha Hart, Paddy Considine, Faraz Ayub
DIRECTION: Shan Khan
No film starring ace character-actor Paddy Considine (The Bourne Ultimatum, Dead Man’s Shoes) can ever be wholly worthless, but Honour won’t be counted as a career highlight for him.
On particularly terse and glowering form here, he plays a nameless bounty hunter hired by families to track down runaway young women who have supposedly sullied their kinsfolk’s good name.
Honour killing is indeed a deeply serious issue, fully deserving of robust dramatic treatment. But it’s as if the filmmakers felt they couldn’t deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings, with a kettle-drum-heavy, action-movie soundtrack, umbral lighting and a white antihero, who has to be a one-time National Front supporter in order to make his moral journey interesting.
The striking Aiysha Hart holds up her end well as the bounty hunter’s terrified target, and writer-director Shan Khan’s script at least tries out tricky manoeuvres with its chopped-up chronology, but it’s hard to work out for whom this semi-interesting hot mess was intended. – Guardian News and Media
DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
