Noorilhuda's Blog - Posts Tagged "oscars"
CULTURAL INACCURACIES IN 'DUKHTAR' - Pakistan's official entry for Oscars 2015:
Pakistan is a kaleidoscope of such a colorful and morbid reality that I have often thought an exercise in fiction about this country is a useless exercise - after all, the daily news is strange enough to make a good dramatic story.
This is primarily the reason ‘Dukhtar’, Pakistan’s official entry for Oscars 2015, is a letdown. Made by a Pakistani with the sensibilities of a foreigner, the script is barren and characters as cardboard in the end as they were in the first scene that introduced them. On paper, making a film about the menace of child marriage and female barter ship to settle scores and make peace between vengeful tribes seems like a winning idea, especially if you are aiming for international awards and festivals. Heck, even the idea of a woman wanting more out of her life is great. However, from the get-go you feel like you are watching a bunch of actors thrown about to ‘fit’ a narrative that is as far-fetched as a Punjabi film. What makes it worse is that you do not feel any empathy or sense of danger for the leads.
Afia Nathaniel’s first shot is of a dreaming mother visualizing a life out in the open - an idea that remains unexplored for the whole film. Since the film fails to explain where it takes place, you are left to make assumptions based on the dialects and looks of the leads and the location of shoot. It seems like Samiya Mumtaz is an urdu-speaking Punjabi married off to a Pashtun tribal warlord as a 15-year old and now has a ten-year old daughter with him. How did that happen would have made for a far more entertaining story. If she is supposed to play a Pathan or Hunzai, she could have atleast worked on her accent. It’s almost like a white man playing a black one and as much insensitive. For a story that takes place allegedly in Pukhtun and/ or Northern Areas, the lead roles are given to non-Pathan actors who never look a shred beyond what they are: Karachiittes.
As the husband, legendary Asif Khan is grotesquely underused. Samina Ahmed who only shows up in the last reel of the film has more significance than him. Khan is the sole man of his tribe to go blindfolded to neighboring Nuristan (Mullah Fazlullah’s hangout) to talk peace with a warring chieftain who has lost more men to Khan than vice versa. Instead of shooting Khan dead on the spot like any warring chief worth his salt and kalashnikov, the old chieftain propositions marriage to his girl-child. No money, smuggled goods, arms, goats or territories are offered. Just a single girl-child. And viola! there will be singing doves!
Mumtaz, who has made a career out of the single-tone painful expression perennially registered on her face, is the only adult female in her home, in the un-named village, on the road and in subsequent rooftops and cellphone chit chats. It is not till she reaches Lahore that the viewer sees another woman on Planet Pakistan. This is another one of those elements used by foreigners when making films about cultures they don’t have time for nor care to know. When I interviewed Pushto poet Akmal Laywanay in his home in Shamozai, Mardan in 2007 amidst his reservations on a woman entering the ‘mardana’ side of the house, the ‘zanana’ (female section in conservative households) was still full of women and girls from the very old to the very young. There was one ‘modern’ (read ‘Indian’) bathroom in the village and that was in another house down the street. The girls were all uneducated and could only understand Pushto. None of them had access to a man. Right after the Lal Masjid massacre, I spoke to the survivors and their families (living in Rahim Yar Khan, Mansehra, Charsadda and Islamabad) and two things were clear: girls wore burka and had no access to TV, not even PTV and fathers were openly affectionate to daughters they barely saw.
Nathaniel’s world of conservative dangerous households consists of a girl-child going to a school, learning English, with a mother who regularly watches dramas and is alone with untamed relatives! The husband and father, Khan, is shown as cold but in his house, the females are doing alright!
Choices make or break lives and nobody knows it better than a Pakistani woman. Once a bunch of educated brilliant women from Dir working as medical health practitioners (doctor, nurse, LHW) backtracked on a scheduled interview because they feared they would be shot in Peshawar during recording of the program - not by their families but by extremists! And remember the Kohistan video scandal where the mere videotaping of clapping girls was enough to ensure their death as well as that of the four brothers - two of whom were dancing in the video? The case that led Supreme Court to pass orders that no girl will be killed and Farzana Bari to eulogize to uninterested locals that ‘these are your women, you have to protect them’? The net result was the alleged throwing of all girls in the river and murder of the video-makers. This is the reality of going against tradition.
Hence, it is inexplicable how Nathaniel envisaged a woman in bright clothes could scurry through an entire narrow pathway without being seen by a single man or child, manage to get hold of a truck driver, sit next to him on the front seat, moonlight with him for days, never have a discussion with her daughter about why they ran, never show any kind of urgency of the danger they are in or interest in the fact that they will be killed, and yet still be surprised when she is caught, accused of having a lover and about to be shot dead! Anjuman gyrating in the fields of Punjab does not look so far-fetched anymore.
Another aspect in which the film fails women is the manner in which the mother endangers the life of her own child time and time again and how a stranger, a truck driver, comes to their rescue again and again. Why he does so in the first place is never explained. In the funniest scene of the entire film, he actually abandons his truck for a woman he barely knows! It’s almost like the coal miners leaving the donkey that their lives depend on. As all the drivers of burning NATO containers will tell you - no truck is ever left behind. He is also the first trucker who has forgotten his slang, expletives, loud music, opium, nose picking, rubbing his shalwar and general horniness - or maybe he is hiding it all under his well-blow-dried hair. I half-expected him to break into a ‘luddi’ dance (folk dance) on the rooftop he romances Mumtaz.
And last but not least, the clumsy half-baked death threat of Ajab Gul’s wannabe paramour in the end, where he resists shooting the woman he has been hunting for days is so incredibly juvenile that it bares disbelief. In 1999, Samia Sarwar was shot dead by the man her own mother brought along to her lawyer’s office. Little has changed since then. Every other day a ticker passes by on TV screens telling how some father has swiftly gotten rid of his ‘wayward’ daughter. Lesson: nobody thinks twice before shooting a woman.
To top it all of, the idea that Lahore is a safe haven for them is childish. Just four months ago, a pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death amongst spectators and police outside Lahore High Court. Her name was Farzana Parveen. No place is safe for such women. But then a neat bow could not be tied over the parceled film, could it?
The three things that Nathaniel gets right in the film are the truck, the cinematography and the girl-child (played in vivacious intelligent strokes by Saleha Arif stealing every scene she is in).
It’s great that indigenous subjects are being taken up for filmmaking. Pakistan is our country - bloodied, bruised, ignorant, emotional, frustrated - with an incredible richness of mood, thought and expression - forever gliding between what could be and what is. Let’s not put it in a sanitized box.
This is primarily the reason ‘Dukhtar’, Pakistan’s official entry for Oscars 2015, is a letdown. Made by a Pakistani with the sensibilities of a foreigner, the script is barren and characters as cardboard in the end as they were in the first scene that introduced them. On paper, making a film about the menace of child marriage and female barter ship to settle scores and make peace between vengeful tribes seems like a winning idea, especially if you are aiming for international awards and festivals. Heck, even the idea of a woman wanting more out of her life is great. However, from the get-go you feel like you are watching a bunch of actors thrown about to ‘fit’ a narrative that is as far-fetched as a Punjabi film. What makes it worse is that you do not feel any empathy or sense of danger for the leads.
Afia Nathaniel’s first shot is of a dreaming mother visualizing a life out in the open - an idea that remains unexplored for the whole film. Since the film fails to explain where it takes place, you are left to make assumptions based on the dialects and looks of the leads and the location of shoot. It seems like Samiya Mumtaz is an urdu-speaking Punjabi married off to a Pashtun tribal warlord as a 15-year old and now has a ten-year old daughter with him. How did that happen would have made for a far more entertaining story. If she is supposed to play a Pathan or Hunzai, she could have atleast worked on her accent. It’s almost like a white man playing a black one and as much insensitive. For a story that takes place allegedly in Pukhtun and/ or Northern Areas, the lead roles are given to non-Pathan actors who never look a shred beyond what they are: Karachiittes.
As the husband, legendary Asif Khan is grotesquely underused. Samina Ahmed who only shows up in the last reel of the film has more significance than him. Khan is the sole man of his tribe to go blindfolded to neighboring Nuristan (Mullah Fazlullah’s hangout) to talk peace with a warring chieftain who has lost more men to Khan than vice versa. Instead of shooting Khan dead on the spot like any warring chief worth his salt and kalashnikov, the old chieftain propositions marriage to his girl-child. No money, smuggled goods, arms, goats or territories are offered. Just a single girl-child. And viola! there will be singing doves!
Mumtaz, who has made a career out of the single-tone painful expression perennially registered on her face, is the only adult female in her home, in the un-named village, on the road and in subsequent rooftops and cellphone chit chats. It is not till she reaches Lahore that the viewer sees another woman on Planet Pakistan. This is another one of those elements used by foreigners when making films about cultures they don’t have time for nor care to know. When I interviewed Pushto poet Akmal Laywanay in his home in Shamozai, Mardan in 2007 amidst his reservations on a woman entering the ‘mardana’ side of the house, the ‘zanana’ (female section in conservative households) was still full of women and girls from the very old to the very young. There was one ‘modern’ (read ‘Indian’) bathroom in the village and that was in another house down the street. The girls were all uneducated and could only understand Pushto. None of them had access to a man. Right after the Lal Masjid massacre, I spoke to the survivors and their families (living in Rahim Yar Khan, Mansehra, Charsadda and Islamabad) and two things were clear: girls wore burka and had no access to TV, not even PTV and fathers were openly affectionate to daughters they barely saw.
Nathaniel’s world of conservative dangerous households consists of a girl-child going to a school, learning English, with a mother who regularly watches dramas and is alone with untamed relatives! The husband and father, Khan, is shown as cold but in his house, the females are doing alright!
Choices make or break lives and nobody knows it better than a Pakistani woman. Once a bunch of educated brilliant women from Dir working as medical health practitioners (doctor, nurse, LHW) backtracked on a scheduled interview because they feared they would be shot in Peshawar during recording of the program - not by their families but by extremists! And remember the Kohistan video scandal where the mere videotaping of clapping girls was enough to ensure their death as well as that of the four brothers - two of whom were dancing in the video? The case that led Supreme Court to pass orders that no girl will be killed and Farzana Bari to eulogize to uninterested locals that ‘these are your women, you have to protect them’? The net result was the alleged throwing of all girls in the river and murder of the video-makers. This is the reality of going against tradition.
Hence, it is inexplicable how Nathaniel envisaged a woman in bright clothes could scurry through an entire narrow pathway without being seen by a single man or child, manage to get hold of a truck driver, sit next to him on the front seat, moonlight with him for days, never have a discussion with her daughter about why they ran, never show any kind of urgency of the danger they are in or interest in the fact that they will be killed, and yet still be surprised when she is caught, accused of having a lover and about to be shot dead! Anjuman gyrating in the fields of Punjab does not look so far-fetched anymore.
Another aspect in which the film fails women is the manner in which the mother endangers the life of her own child time and time again and how a stranger, a truck driver, comes to their rescue again and again. Why he does so in the first place is never explained. In the funniest scene of the entire film, he actually abandons his truck for a woman he barely knows! It’s almost like the coal miners leaving the donkey that their lives depend on. As all the drivers of burning NATO containers will tell you - no truck is ever left behind. He is also the first trucker who has forgotten his slang, expletives, loud music, opium, nose picking, rubbing his shalwar and general horniness - or maybe he is hiding it all under his well-blow-dried hair. I half-expected him to break into a ‘luddi’ dance (folk dance) on the rooftop he romances Mumtaz.
And last but not least, the clumsy half-baked death threat of Ajab Gul’s wannabe paramour in the end, where he resists shooting the woman he has been hunting for days is so incredibly juvenile that it bares disbelief. In 1999, Samia Sarwar was shot dead by the man her own mother brought along to her lawyer’s office. Little has changed since then. Every other day a ticker passes by on TV screens telling how some father has swiftly gotten rid of his ‘wayward’ daughter. Lesson: nobody thinks twice before shooting a woman.
To top it all of, the idea that Lahore is a safe haven for them is childish. Just four months ago, a pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death amongst spectators and police outside Lahore High Court. Her name was Farzana Parveen. No place is safe for such women. But then a neat bow could not be tied over the parceled film, could it?
The three things that Nathaniel gets right in the film are the truck, the cinematography and the girl-child (played in vivacious intelligent strokes by Saleha Arif stealing every scene she is in).
It’s great that indigenous subjects are being taken up for filmmaking. Pakistan is our country - bloodied, bruised, ignorant, emotional, frustrated - with an incredible richness of mood, thought and expression - forever gliding between what could be and what is. Let’s not put it in a sanitized box.
