Black studies thirdworld cinema

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on which she writes that he would be good as “a gentle, big, dumb nice guy.”

This isn’t the place to engage in a long discussion of typecasting. (See Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s essay on the topic in her anthology, Movie Acting: The Film Reader [Routledge, 2004]). Suffice it to say that the creation of character in plays or movies always involves an interaction between type and individual. Marilyn Monroe played a type—the dumb blonde—but she was also a particular individual whose performing traits made the type feel radiantly sexy, touching, and ideologically complex. Most kinds of theater and film involve typing. Shake- speare’s actors specialized in typed roles, and classic Hollywood actors played modern types associated with certain physical traits. The early Soviet cinema employed typage, based on the notion that the actor should embody the social class of the character and if possible come from that class (in practice this meant that proletarians looked heroical- ly muscular and capitalists looked bloated). The neorealists cast amateur actors, but those actors often were typecast. Brecht rejected typage and did cast against type, but his theater was deeply concerned with social class and involved typed behavior. Casting against type can overturn cliché and be aes- thetically or politically effective; even so, you need the type in order to cast against it.

Films with large casts often involve a mix- ture of casting strategies. Consider Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961): Karl Malden is cast against type; Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens are examples of Hollywood typage (both were cowboys before becoming actors); and Katy Jurado, Pina Pellicer, and Timothy Carey are typecast, although each brings a unique quality to their role. In simi- lar fashion, casting directors use a mix of strategies. In Casting By Lynn Stalmaster recalls how he found a local Georgia boy, Billy Joe Redden, for the “dueling banjos” sequence in Deliverance (1972)—a technique one might describe as neorealist typage.

Where Marion Dougherty is concerned, her major achievement seems less a matter of casting against type than of seizing upon changed conditions in the entertainment industry. She found new faces and new per- forming styles on stages in New York, and used them to help create a “New York look” in films of the Sixties and Seventies. Given the emphasis on naturalist performance in the period, her casting choices also put less emphasis on glamour than classic Holly- wood had done.

Today’s industry, especially the part rep- resented by tent-pole Hollywood, has changed once again, except in gross-out comedies. “They want younger, hotter peo- ple,” casting director Risa Brandon Garcia tells us in Casting By. But the values Dougherty brought to her job left their mark on an important period of American cinema, and fortunately they haven’t disap- peared.—James Naremore

Wadjda Produced by Roman Paul and Gerhard Meixner; written and directed by Haifaa Al Mansour; cinematography by Lutz Reitemeier; production design by Thomas Molt; edited by Andreas Wodraschke; costume design by Peter Pohl; starring Waad Mohammed, Reem Abdullah, Abdullrahman Al Gohani, Ahd, and Sultan Al Assaf. Color, 112 min., Arabic dialog with English subtitles. A Sony Pictures Classics release, www.sonyclassics.com.

Wadjda is a film about a quietly defiant ten-year-old Saudi girl, which few Saudi Ara- bians will see. The kingdom does not have a single movie theater. Haifaa Al Mansour’s debut feature, which is the first to be made in Saudi Arabia by a woman, employing an all- Saudi cast, will eventually wend its way into Saudi homes rigged with illegal satellite dish- es. For Westerners, Wadjda provides a first look at middle-class life in the kingdom, especially that of women and girls, with an upbeat narrative that portends imminent social change. For members of this conserva- tive Islamic society, Wadjda and her emo- tionally estranged parents are emblematic of the clash of fundamentalist Sunni law and tribal customs with those of an increasingly educated and progressive class.

Wadjda opens with an image of feet clad in black shoes and white, lace-edged ankle socks, followed by a quick shot of school- girls in modified black abayas intoning reli- gious verses. Then, the line of shoes parts to reveal Wadjda’s (Waad Mohammed) navy sneakers. (The young actress wore the same brand to her audition.) For any Saudi citizen broadminded enough to watch this human rights film, the visual pun that first endears

us to Al Mansour’s protagonist presents a discomforting illustration of nonconformi- ty, as it does for the headmistress at Wadj- da’s madrassah. The girl’s blue sneakers and purple shoelaces and, later, her azure nail polish, are shocking spots of color, whiffs of dissent, subverting the anonymity of her mandated black attire. In a country where nearly every art form, save the chanting of Quranic verse, is forbidden by the clerics and enforced by mutaween, the brutal reli- gious police, Wadjda is in itself a triumph.

Wadjda’s story really begins about ten minutes into the movie, in a delightful point-of-view shot of a bicycle that seems to be in motion along the top of a stone wall. Actually, it is mounted on a truck that Wad- jda follows to a local shop. The gleaming green bike costs far more than what Wadjda has saved from her many entrepreneurial pursuits, so she begins needling her mother for the cash, until she learns of a competi- tion at school that awards prize money, which would allow her to buy the bike. It involves mastering Quranic verses—some- thing in which Wadjda has no interest and that she soon realizes is an enormous task. Meanwhile, the shopkeeper, from whom Wadjda extracts a tenuous promise not to sell the bike to anyone else, comes to admire the brazen girl who presents him with a mix tape to seal the bargain. Wadjda has another ally, her friend Abdullah (Abdullrahman Al Gohani), who abandons soccer games with other boys just to walk alongside her.

Like Iranian films featuring child protag- onists, which are allegories of that state’s contemporary social and political conflicts, Al Mansour’s story of a girl who yearns for freedom of movement is a critique of the Wahhabi stranglehold on Saudi life. At one point in the movie, Wadjda’s otherwise

Ten-year-old Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) is determined to come up with enough money to buy this green bicycle in Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda (photo by Tobias Kownatzki).

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indulgent mother (Reem Abdullah) refuses to allow Abdullah to string lights across the roof of their home for his uncle’s upcoming political rally. He is not a member of the Wahhabi tribe, and they are. Wahhabi war- riors, the Ikhwan (“Brotherhood”), were instrumental in establishing the Al Saud monarchy, and the two remain aligned through the Ulema, a group of Muslim cler- ics, not unlike Iran’s ruling caliphs. This confederacy has weathered several uprisings, some quite recent, by descendants of the original Ikhwan who want to depose the Al Sauds and establish a “pure” Islamic state. Wahhabi madrassahs, such as the one Wadj- da attends in the movie, indoctrinate young people into the most extreme form of Islam, perpetuating the orthodoxy that remains the hallmark of Saudi culture.

Wadjda ignores her mother’s wishes and invites Abdullah to hang the lights, provided he brings his bicycle along and teaches her to ride it. Respectable girls do not ride bikes in Saudi, and while Abdullah at first resists, Wadjda’s crocodile tears seal his promise. At home, Wadjda listens to rock music on an underground radio channel, clad in jeans and a T-shirt. She braids bracelets with soccer team colors to sell at school, even though it is against the rules. Soon after the contest announcement, Wadjda joins a religious club to master the Quran, convincing many of her classmates and the headmistress that she is ready to conform. From the standpoint of Western audiences, this ruse is hardly offen- sive; it is a revolt against authority that estab- lishes the hero’s identity. We admire Wadjda’s pluck and intelligence, and root for her suc- cess, despite Al Mansour’s niggling visual and narrative cues suggesting that, while Wadjda is shielded somewhat by virtue of her social class and her working mother’s progressive viewpoints, she lives in a theocratic state.

Wadjda provides a dramatic picture of how the women’s abayas, paired with hijabs and niqabs (face veils), erase them from public life entirely, and in Wadjda’s madras- sah, there are glimpses of how the girls first become inured to it. As Wadjda looks on, Ms. Hussa (Ahd) reminds two noisy stu- dents that “a woman’s voice is her naked- ness,” a reference to the Quran. She admon- ishes Wadjda for playing hopscotch in the schoolyard in view of construction workers perched on a nearby roof. Often, the planes of the school building, even its exterior walls, appear to ensnare the students; in fact, Wadjda’s punishment for failing to wear her hijab is to stand in the searing heat of the school’s sun-drenched courtyard. If the madrassah feels like an oubliette and Ms. Hussa its guardian beast, Al Mansour never- theless avoids easy conclusions about Wadj- da’s education. At school, girls learn how to survive Saudi’s oppressive patriarchy. While we never learn Ms. Hussa’s backstory, in the scene in which she compares her girlhood self to Wadjda, the implication is that some- thing terrible happened to her that sent her

scurrying for protection. Her position pro- vides that protection, and power as well.

Al Mansour often frames Wadjda and Abdullah, together and separately, in long shot, their backdrop a series of forbidding empty lots and construction sites. As Wadjda traverses one sandy parcel, a worker hurls sexual remarks, extending the feeling of fore- boding from the previous scene at school in which Ms. Hussa silences the garrulous girls. Suddenly, the many shades of Wadjda’s vul- nerability are palpable, Al Mansour height- ening our sensibilities to the dangers all Saudi women and girls confront in a society where men move freely and women are con- strained, judged by the measure of their modesty. Not unlike what her characters might have encountered in similar circum- stances had they been just a few years older, Al Mansour received threats for mixing with male members of her Saudi and German crew while on location in Riyadh. (Wadjda’s producers are Roman Paul and Gerhard Meixner, known for Paradise Now, Waltz with Bashir, and The Patience Stone.) Mar- ried or unmarried, Saudi women are rarely in the company of unrelated men, custom and Wahhabi interpretation of the Quran deeming such behavior as provocative.

Wadjda can be perceived as a coming-of- age story, but the girl’s perspicacity pushes the boundaries of that interpretation. Like all rebels spawned in hypocrisy, Wadjda can no more ignore the deceit at her new madrassah than she can the insincerity in her own family. She learns that Ms. Hussa has a lover, yet when an older classmate of Wadjda’s enjoys a brief tryst with her boyfriend, Ms. Hussa sees to it that she is arrested by the mutaween. In her private life, Wadjda discovers that, while her father may love her, girls are of no account in a Wahhabi family. As has been the tradition since Abdulaziz Al Saud founded the king- dom—recording the births of his forty-five sons while leaving his daughters uncounted and unnamed—Wadjda’s father denies her a place in his family tree. In a heartrending scene, she scribbles her name on a sheet of paper and attaches it to the poster of her paternal family’s roots only later to find it torn off and discarded.

Similarly misogynist practices figure into the plot of Wadjda, especially in the marital relationship of Wadjda’s parents. We learn early in the film that Wadjda’s paternal grand- mother is seeking another wife for her son. Wadja’s mother (referred to simply as “Moth- er” in the credits) can no longer bear children, so under the laws of polygamy exclusively reserved for men, her husband (Sultan Al Assaf) can take another wife in order to pro- duce a male heir. He can even abandon his present family with impunity. If she sues for divorce, Mother needs several male family members to represent her in an Islamic “court” because women have no legal standing in Saudi. They cannot open a bank account without the permission of their fathers or hus-

bands and are prevented from leaving home without a male chauffeur because only men are permitted to drive. Mother nearly loses her job when an argument leads to her driver’s refusal to pick her up.

If Al Mansour appears to sidestep issues of physical abuse, for instance, by portraying an educated family, it is what she knows. She had lenient parents, a mother who was a social worker and a poet-father who liked to watch movies with his family, and allowed his daughter to ride her bike in their back- yard. The filmmaker does touch on the issue of child brides in a scene at a religious club meeting. Wadjda and her classmates discov- er that a student of about her age has just been married to an older man in a match arranged by her family. Violence against women and girls in the form of rape or physical abuse is not addressed beyond this scene, although at one point Wadja’s moth- er mentions that a driver kept a female friend trapped in a car for three hours over a minor squabble. The character of Ms. Hussa is obviously an opportunity to illustrate the role women play in perpetuating the reli- gious patriarchy, and in fostering an atmos- phere of suspicion and mistrust. After an instance of harmless physical contact between two girls in the courtyard of the madrassah, Ms. Hussa bans all hand holding and forbids the students to exchange gifts.

In an April interview with this reviewer, Al Mansour admitted that some self- imposed limits on portraying life in the kingdom derived from a desire not to alien- ate Western audiences. Setting Wadjda on Saudi soil, and casting native-born perform- ers, posed substantial challenges, yet allowed Al Mansour to accomplish the goal she set out for herself as the kingdom’s first female filmmaker—to tell a universal story through the eyes of a Saudi girl. Saudi is widely con- demned by human rights organizations for its treatment of women and girls, yet Al Mansour points to small signs of progress, such as the first appearance of Saudi female athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games. Her optimism is reflected in her spunky heroine and, in some measure, by Abdullah’s grow- ing admiration for Wadjda’s vitality.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a Saudi luminary, lent significant support to Wadjda and served as producer. A nephew of the king and an advocate for women’s rights, he is among the richest men in the world, and employs many women at his media compa- ny in Riyadh, where they are required to wear Western dress and to be observant Muslims. (They also must be thin, as the prince himself says in the Icarus Films docu- mentary, Saudi Solutions.) His holdings in mass-media companies will likely provide a broadcast vehicle for Wadjda in the Middle East. Jordan’s Queen Noor, known for her philanthropic initiatives to aid women, attended the Tribeca Film Festival screening and after-party for Wadjda.

While such connections to Saudi royalty

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undoubtedly benefit the film, Al Mansour’s casting of two well-known Saudi actresses in costarring roles helped to surmount the worst hurdles. Reem Abdullah is a popular television star, a member of the cast of Tash Ma Tash (“No Big Deal”), a comedy show that airs surprising satires of Wahhabi teachings. (A banned episode about the reli- gious police, with English subtitles, can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=a8AU3XkxzTk.) Ahd, who plays Ms. Hussa, recently appeared in Serenity (2013), a short she wrote and directed, which was screened at the Berlinale. The actress, who studied in the United States, gives an exceptionally nuanced performance, communicating unexplored depths in Ms. Hussa’s vindictive nature. Reem Abdullah’s film debut is less impressive; she never adequately conveys her character’s anguish over her husband’s possible abandonment. In light of her seem- ingly contradictory roles as observant Mus- lim wife and freethinking woman, it is diffi- cult for Western audiences to grasp the courage in Mother’s final decision to end her marriage.

Waad Mohammed, with the gangly stature of adolescence intact, peers into mir- rors looking for her mother’s beauty to be reflected there, and shrugs. Yet, when the boy Abdullah tells her she is entirely on her own in confronting her mother’s recalci- trant driver in an immigrant squat at the edge of town, there is a flash of the woman she will become. It is a sublime perfor- mance, a combination of the twelve-year- old’s integrity and Al Mansour’s conjuring of her own girlhood self. For the writer- director, Wadjda embodies an imagined his- torical moment: a girl atop her bike on a Riyadh street, her unfettered hair caught by the wind, when no male guardian has given her permission to be there.—Maria Garcia

Byzantium Produced by Sam Englebardt, William D. Johnson, Elizabeth Karlsen, Alan Moloney, and Stephen Woolley; directed by Neil Jordan; screenplay by Moira Buffini, from her play A Vampire Story; cinematography by Sean Bobbitt; production design by Simon Elliott; costume design by Consolata Boyle; edited by Tony Lawson; music by Javier Navarrete; starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Jonny Lee Miller, Caleb Landry Jones, Daniel Mays, Uri Gavriel, Tom Hollander, and Maria Doyle Kennedy. Color, 118 min. An IFC Films release, www.ifcfilms.com.

Some things never grow old: bloodsuck- ing succubae for one thing, several of Neil Jordan’s directorial preoccupations for another. Watching Byzantium, it’s hard to demur when the angst-ridden eternal ado- lescent at the movie’s heart muses at one point that “we’ve been here before.” Despite

being conceived and written by another artist altogether (playwright and screen- writer Moira Buffini), Jordan’s seventeenth feature offers a compendium of visual and narrative motifs, mannerisms, and make- believe familiar from his earlier work. Most obvious of all is the fact that Byzantium’s central protagonists are undead: Although first seen eking out a hand-to-mouth exis- tence in present-day England, mother-and- daughter duo Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) have become vam- pires some two centuries previous. As Jor- dan freely notes in numerous promotional interviews, that fantastical structuring con- ceit and narrative timescale makes Byzan- tium “a companion piece” to his most com- mercially successful feature, 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. None of this, however, is to suggest that viewers who have found themselves unconvinced by this director’s full-blooded signature—that attempts to meld Gothic fantasy and social realism, pop- ular genre appeal and auteurist self-expres- sion—should automatically avoid his latest movie according to the principle: once bit- ten, twice shy.

Byzantium’s narrative is, well, byzantine. Summarizing the film’s story is no straight- forward or speedy task, and leaves one feel- ing rather like the character of Eleanor with- in the work itself, diligently filling journal page upon journal page with a dutiful chronology of unlikely twists and (re)turns from the dead. But there are several reasons why setting out the movie’s plot at length is a useful thing to do. Firstly, it acts as a salu- tary reminder that one key trademark of much/most of Neil Jordan’s cinema involves its frequently full-blooded engagement with the lurid pleasures, and potential pratfalls, of genre narrative: fantasy, horror, and

melodrama most especially of all. Secondly, retracing Byzantium’s story arc in detail underscores the remarkably intensive and extensive nature of the film’s engagement with other aspects of, and tropes from, its director’s oeuvre—a quality that is perhaps surprising, given that this project represents one of only a small number of occasions in Jordan’s prolific career when he has not assumed scriptwriting as well as directorial duties. Yet despite this fact, and as the film- maker himself notes in an interview in this issue of Cineaste, “there was a strange inter- face” between his latest feature and “a lot of the films I had done” previously—recount- ing Byzantium’s plot at detailed length is an effective way of illustrating the extent to which this is so. And thirdly, paying painstaking attention to matters of plot— action, reaction, resolution; situation, com- plication, explication—feels like a fitting manner in which to approach a work that takes the psychological and cultural impor- tance of storytelling as one of its central themes. Indeed, Eleanor’s schoolteacher renders this subtext explicit by delivering a lesson during which he argues that “stories” are the means by which human beings “come to understand ourselves and…come to understand the world.”

Byzantium strains visibly to illustrate the truth of this fictional academic’s axiom. It does so not least by trying to turn a flagrant- ly fantastical narrative setup (as long ago as 1997, Jordan was happily writing off “most vampire movies” as “jokes actually…a bit camp”) to socially and psychologically forensic observational ends. It’s certainly the case that Clara and Eleanor cut a com- pellingly complex central pairing, at once both predator and prey. While the women undoubtedly have blood on their hands—

Clara (Gemma Arterton) finds a safe hiding place for herself and her daughter at a run-down hotel in an English seaside resort in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (photo by Christopher Raphael).

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