Sony’s new release from Match Factory, Tribeca and Venice
film festivals, “Wadjda” (directed by a woman, Haifaa Al-Mansour) seems to be
the first film ever shot on location in Saudi Arabia, a country which
apparently still has no public cinemas as we know them.
The film was shot around Riyadh, but the outdoor scenes seem
to be in drab, flat neighborhoods of low-rise concrete residences and
shops. Only once, at the end, does the
film take us to the edge of the desert and its nothingness. The sunny sky
always seems hazy, even smoggy. This is
the closest we can come to taking a trip to another planet with a real
civilization, except going to China perhaps.
Ordinary non-Muslim Americans can’t
go to Saudi Arabia very easily, although I know a gay Jewish man who actually
biked in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980’s.
The story concerns a pre-teen girl Wadjda (Waad Mohammed)
who wants go buy a bicycle. In Saudi
culture, women have been forbidden to ride bikes if of child-bearing age, or
(usually) drive cars. She meets all the
usual cultural resistance from her mother (Reem Abdullah) and her girls’
school, especially the headmistress Ms. Hussa (Ahd). She decides to join a Koran-recitation
contest to earn enough money for the bike.
Being very smart and intellectually gifted (probably capable of medical
school), she wins it. But then the
school make her give her winnings to Palestinian fighters. Can she still get her bike? That’s a screenwriting problem.
The movie (98 minutes) is slow, and a bit tedious with a lot
of dialogue about mundane matters from a western perspective. But the film shows well the foundations of
Saudi and “fundamentalist” Sunni Muslim culture (as did Iran’s “A Separation”
for Shiite Islam), as tied to disciplining every single person. Yes, totalitarian societies do that. But the fanatical attention to separating and
covering the sexes in Saudi society seems predicated on the idea that almost
every woman can become a wife and mother and every male can become a husband
and father; no distractions are tolerated.
Infidelity or “sexual immorality” is not so much a crime against the
consent or trust of another person as it is against the perceive future of the
culture, which requires babies raised according to religious rules. The script, in a couple places, specifically refers to loyalty not just to family but to one's "tribe". My understanding is that the Islamist idea of
the afterlife is that it starts at the end of all time, not just at death. From the viewpoint of physics, that makes
less sense.
The best official site seems to be here.
The film, despite a major distributor, seems to play in only
one theater in the DC area, Landmark’s Bethesda Row, in an area with heavy
construction and detours and inconvenient from northern VA, although I got
there OK and parked in a garage about six blocks away for a Saturday morning
show.
Wikipedia attribution link for aerial picture of Riyadh
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