Sadiq's celebrated and ground breaking film is a gorgeously filmed melodrama featuring remarkable performances. Like much queer cinema, Joyland is tragic and melancholy, but upends this expectation a bit while also remains inspiringly hopeful.
Sadiq masterfully frames his shots and fills them with gorgeous colour that pops out of the darkness of both the story and the background. Joyland is lush and astonishingly decadent yet never feeling overwrought. He demonstrates a real power to his story telling both in how he sets his characters against such incredible surroundings but also in how he gives us little moments which say so much.
His cast is strong too but for me the standout was Farooq whose character is denied all that she desires and struggles to fit into the world he has been set into. She lashes out but with a restraint that is electric to watch. Kahn's character gets to in many ways be even more assertive in her own identity, refusing to take on the roles all those around her expect and insisting on boundaries that support who she is. Finally, at the centre of the film is Junejo's Haider, who quietly tries to find joy around him and succumbs to never being what the women in his life need from him.
There is a real power to how all of Joyland comes together, with small moments highlighting the larger story structure, and the small amount of hope we are left with as the film reaches its conclusion, and not the conclusion once expects. Queer cinema is often a history of queer characters marginalized or worse, but here the queer and trans characters assert themselves and choose their own destinies while it is the straight characters who face the fates that more often happen to the queer ones. In this way Joyland is quite remarkable and wonderfully unexpected.
Joyland
Starring: Ali Junejo, Alina Kahn, Rasti Farooq
Director: Saim Sadiq
Writers: Maggie Briggs, Saim Sadiq
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