Joyland film review — trans love story from Pakistan is an act of graceful defiance

In the same week that new British romcom What’s Love Got to Do with It? surveys assisted marriages in Pakistan from the perspective of west London, you might call the vivid, expansive Joyland the real thing. The drama is the debut of director Saim Sadiq, and his poised tale of tangled lives in Lahore makes quite an introduction.

An arranged marriage is where we start: the young couple are soft-centred Haider (Ali Junejo) and live-wire make-up artist Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq). Already an inch outside traditional norms, they each incur the weary disappointment of Haider’s patriarch father. Having failed to give him a grandson, Haider’s unemployment causes dismay too. But then, at last, he lands a job: a gig in a risqué dance troupe led by Biba (Alina Khan), a hard-shell transgender woman for whom he slowly falls.

In a conservative religious state, Biba’s very existence can seem defiant. The same has proved true of Joyland. After becoming the first Pakistani film to appear at the Cannes Film Festival, its domestic release was derailed by Islamist protests at the prominence of a trans character. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting then only allowed the “repugnant” film to be released after cuts. (It remains banned in Punjab.) As an ugly emblem of the repression the story is tied up with, it could hardly be more fitting.

Yet while the movie can be banned, it cannot be diminished. Khan is a bona fide movie star, and the violence Biba faces is part of the fabric of the film. But Joyland’s hallmark is the breadth and nuance it affords every one of its characters. All, we realise, are in some kind of transition. That generosity is summed up by the camerawork: a graceful, roving eye that routinely finds all parties in a scene before coming to rest on the most interesting place in the room.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from February 24