A lesson in the other of visuality, narrative desire, and body politics, Joyland revels in a deconstructive tune. Combining metaphors of emancipation, murder, and desolation, it is a masterclass in queer filmography and instructive in scripting the body and inscribing jouissance into celluloid.

Sadiq’s Joyland (2022) is at times blasphemous and at times gorgeous, and, indeed, overwhelmingly both. The film bears an unimaginable density of truth, longing and grim premonitions. The vision is immense, distilled masterfully into delicate symbolism. The lights are equally brilliant, dispersed, a little out of reach, as happiness always is; the film does well to teach us. Haider’s (Ali Junejo) fragile frame, Biba’s (Alina Khan) ferocity, Mumtaz’s (Rasti Farooq) intrepid and boundless sense of self, and Nucchi’s (Sarwat Gilani) finally shattered feminine reserve, shelter abrasive and tender acts of resistance within themselves. The film is hardly an embittered tirade against a maiming and smothering patriarch (Salmaan Peerzada)—and it might as well have been a nifty jab at the phallo-monarchic imperial image that the throne he sits on is a wheelchair, himself limp as his enterprise. Rather, it locates its inexorable moment in the agonised body writhing for desire. That desire could and does possess the ability to simultaneously root and uproot patriarchal machinery; that desire wields a fearsome transformative aspect, altering societies and the bodies that inhabit networks of social relations, extraordinarily informs the narrative’s creative purpose.

Sadiq and his cast communicate in images. The wheelchair that inverts the patrilineal image; the blood pooling on the floor from the goat sacrificed by Mumtaz and not Haider that perverts the role of ‘the male in violence’, of ‘the male of violence’; the garish neon stars resting on the face of Haider and Biba, speaking, as if to the deeply moved voyeur, “Here are star-struck lovers”, quite literally; the eponymous Joyland itself that acts as a tether between the two bereft women as they lament the last time they ‘came’—came into orgasm, came into love, came into the privilege of expression encoding homoerotic desire. The most prodigious of images is set aside for the end, for it carries the full force of the film’s vision: the enormity of the ocean that Haider offers himself to—a distinct maritime metaphor of liberation. Mumtaz, like Antigone (her brick-prison the marriage), frees herself in death. Nucchi frees herself in snapping back at her husband and silencing him. Haider frees himself continually throughout the film: in joining Biba’s troupe as a dancer, allowing himself to be clad in a femininity that he had hitherto inhumed deep underneath a blistering masculinity that was not his own; in turning, in naked dance, and offering himself up to Biba so that he could be “had”; in undressing as he floats into the ocean, a final act of self-emancipation. The path of desire is not tread alone, the film emphasises repeatedly in the relationships that overtly or clandestinely unfurl before the audience. Haider’s queer, alternative desire finds company in Biba. Mumtaz’s barren, burning body finds company in the silhouette of a self-pleasuring stranger, the patriarch’s loneliness is balmed by the company of the neighbouring widow. They all want desperately to breathe, to maul the facade they force upon themselves. Normative codes of socialised and embodied desire stand utterly dismantled in the face of the altered bodies that come alive in the company of other desires, not at the cost of them. 

The deconstructive attempt does not stop at questions of desire. Gendered structures are threatened in the womb itself. The grotesque images and suggestions of Mumtaz’s partially conscious and unconscious attempts to kill the male baby in her womb on the patriarch’s birthday produce resistance at the level of the genome and by cumulative affective force, gendered civilisational organisation. It is as if she declares that she would not allow another one to replace the patriarch, to smith the murderous shackles of the household onto another woman, or man, for that matter. 

The film’s genius does not rest here. It manages to portray a complicated queerness in Haider that manifests in both his relationship with Mumtaz and his relationship with Biba. While the latter is quite glaringly obvious, albeit rocky, the former is not to be understood as a relationship that stifles Haider’s queerness. If anything, it helps construct who Haider is and what he means to himself and the world around him. The only person that Mumtaz feels a semblance of desire with is Haider, a desire to explore herself and to dwell outside of herself. There is a subversive ripeness in their relationship that we are allowed to view through the memory of Haider’s proposal to Mumtaz—her consent is of paramount importance to him. It is a ripeness that exists in their conversations, in their friendship, and in Mumtaz’s defending his implicit femininity. When Haider falls apart, Mumtaz collects him. When Mumtaz despairs, Haider, in his capacity, comforts her. They hold each other in the film till they are wedged apart by the expectation of a child, and thereafter the child itself. It is not Haider who kills Mumtaz; it is clear by the end.

A devastating ode to the desiring body and the body in desire, Joyland wields the peculiar ability to draw out the rage, the love, the lust and the fear in both the performer and the performed upon, the performance and the performed for. Working with vastly ambiguous affections, Joyland lures out, and sometimes wrenches free, a raw humanity that waltzes constantly at the precipice of danger, at the peril of its own self, and perhaps it is this reckless audacity that finally speaks to the audience. 

Read Also: Bodies as Battlegrounds: Regimes, Reproduction, and Resistance

Image Credits: Still from Joyland (2022)

Aayudh Pramanik

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