At the end of the Saudi Arabian film called Wadjda — also the name of its 10-year-old heroine, a heart-winningly charming Waad Mohammad — she rides her bicycle into the sunset. Unlike Clint Eastwood style Westerns where comeuppance has been meted out, here the camera pans upwards and we see the girl cycle past a billboard of three men waving, as if in a paternalistic approval of her cycling. The oldest of these three wise Princes, in his pristine white thobe and an enthusiastically dyed moustache, is the 89-year old King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It is a passing, but all too critical, genuflection to the political realities that a filmmaker must negotiate past.
However, Wadjda (pronounced Wazh-deh) — like a saint in the throes of her private revelations — doesn’t notice the King and the powerful Princes. She pedals on. Joy spreads on her oval face. Sunlight sprays itself on the sand dunes and those sitting in the dark theatre reflect on Wadjda’s small triumph in a society that frowns at (but doesn’t ban) women on bicycles. Young Wadjda reaches the end of the street, which now vanishes like a prejudice that has run its course, and merges with an inter-provincial highway. There, savouring the moment, she watches cars stream by. Slender but furious cans of metal and technology driven by men. Only men.
The filmmaker says no more, except to juxtapose the two: Wadjda on her cycle and the cars rushing at the edges of Riyadh. The audience leaves the theatre wondering if this 10-year-old girl on a bicycle will grow up to demand the right to drive an automobile. The film, without a scintilla of explicit didacticism, suggests that by Wadjda’s small act of calibrated rebellion — a girl bicycling — the goal posts have moved. And since no one seems to have protested too much, perhaps that too is possible in due course. On that half-pregnant note, this eponymous film ends. The audience on the Upper West Side of Manhattan bursts into applause. My friend wipes her tears.
Wadjda is made by Haifaa al-Mansour, a Saudi Arabian director who lives in Bahrain. The story is inspiredly simple: Wadjda wants to own and ride a bicycle. That is it. But societal norms question the propriety of such an act. In a way, its one-line tale is no different in its conceit than Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut or Santosh Sivan’s Halo . Tales of children who must traverse through a world created by adults. But unlike those films, it is not a civil war in Lebanon or the looming metropolis of Mumbai that Wadjda must negotiate past. Instead, she must finagle her way through something more invidious and intractable: gender norms. This makes the film more ambitious and difficult to execute in an interesting manner without devolving into a tedious and earnest documentary, on the one hand, or a gratuitous collection of cloying and manufactured cuteness of a child-actor, on the other. That Wadjda avoids this treacle and manages to speak to a complex reality is its greatest triumph. It becomes a miniature masterpiece on celluloid.
A subtext to the film is the audience’s recognition that Saudi women — behind their abaya — have an inner life, a rich one at that, ones filled with intrigue, song, scandal, love and heartbreak. They aren’t a cipher, insists this film. No different than, say Amos Gitai’s Kadosh , which imagined the lives of some Orthodox Jewish women. Wadjda suggests that Saudi women are exemplary evidence of how humans make do, adjust, play it up, press against and push the boundaries given societal restrictions. More so, for many Arab women, it proffers a sense of continuity, a historical memory of their mothers and grandmothers. And in case of Wadjda, who is at the precipice of womanhood, the transition from a headscarf to a full abaya is linked to a rite of passage. Yet, to women like Wadjda’s mother — who wears an abaya on the outside but, in the privacy of her home, wears tight-fitting jeans that accentuate her hips and accompanying languor — the fuss about the abaya is besides the point.
Wadjda has been marketed in the Western press as among the first film shot in Saudi Arabia. Notwithstanding the fact that there have been other feature-length melodramas like Keif al-Hal? , filmmaking in Saudi Arabia is still reliant on powerful and singular patrons like Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. So together, the filmmaker and the financier chart a new course, manufacture new ways of seeing themselves. There is no film culture or even theatres to speak of in Saudi Arabia. Yet the odds are high that Wadjda will win the most-watched award: the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. And if it does, it will be because of its ability to declaim stories closest to home in a diction and emotional vocabulary that transcends the contingencies of history and idiosyncrasies of one particular society. Wadjda , like its heroine, walks that razor’s edge with preternatural skill.
Far from the Western world, many in the Islamic core and periphery will watch this film on pirated videos and private cable services. Not just in far-flung regions of Saudi Arabia, but also in the overwhelmingly Muslim parts of India like Malappuram or Muzaffarabad. The tale of a spunky, scheming girl who struggles against tradition will strike a chord. They will recognise that while a society can collectively restrict women, it can also be full of concealed hopes and subterfuges to circumvent those very restrictions. For this progressive — even if gradualist — message of the film, we must be grateful. For her part, Wadjda, as is her wont in the movie, took matters into her own hand, cycled away and stared into that future. Now, she must wait for the rest of Saudi society to catch up with her. Perhaps, in true cinematic fashion, there will be a sequel. Only this time, she will be on the highway driving a car.