Dir: Haifaa Al Mansour; starring: Waad Mohammed, Reem Abdullah,
Abdullrahman Al Gohani, Sultan Al Assaf. 97 min.
“A woman’s voice reveals her nakedness,” scolds Wadjda’s teacher, as she and
a friend run laughing from a Riyadh sidestreet into their school playground.
“What if a man had heard you?”
Well, plenty of men will hear her now. Wadjda is the first film to have been
entirely filmed within Saudi Arabia, by that country’s first female director, no
less. It tells the story of this ten-year-old schoolgirl, and many like her, and
it is the best thing I have seen at this year’s Venice International Film
Festival so far.
Haifaa Al Mansour’s picture has a kind of neorealist clarity and simplicity
that feels like a welcome splash of ice water after the ponderous, muggy fare
that has so far been screened in competition for the festival’s Golden Lion
award. (Wadjda is showing in the Orrizonti strand, dedicated to new trends in
world cinema.)
Like one of the great Italian neorealist films, it centres on a child and a
bicycle. All Wadjda wants is a bike so she can race against the little boy who
lives next door, but her mother (Reem Abdullah) refuses to buy her one: in Saudi
Arabia, little girls do not ride bicycles. After careful consideration of the
matter Wadjda cannot see the logic in this, so she takes matters into her own
hands and decides to raise the money for a bicycle herself.
Wadjda is perplexed by the Kingdom’s restrictive culture, particularly where
women are concerned: it seems incompatible with a child’s logic. Even though she
covers herself up in accordance with modesty laws, an elderly man still leers at
her openly in the street, and the confusion that flickers across her face speaks
volumes.
Waad Mohammed, a 12-year-old born and raised in Riyadh, is utterly disarming
in the title role: she strikes the perfect balance between cheek and impudence,
and her tomboyish grin lights up the screen.The film largely consists of little
vignettes in the home and at school, and while many of them are very funny, we
get an acute sense of the little everyday frustrations and burdens that Saudi
women have to shoulder.
Al Mansour reveals in the film’s production notes that she often had to
direct from her production van via walkie-talkie when filming in more
conservative areas, but Wadjda offers the hope that for the next generation of
Saudi women, things might be different. Modest as it may look, this is
boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear
those boundaries creak.
