Despite its being filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia, Wadjda, a directorial work from Haifaa al-Mansour, feels aimed mainly toward Western audiences. I have no doubt that many individuals from different backgrounds will find something to enjoy about the movie, but many of the blatant social climates the script spells out, all the soft edges the movie places around its hotly topical subject, seem to be cushioning a fall that mainstream American audiences wouldn’t be able to handle, or recognize in the first place.
It does what it needs to, though. It’s either something or nothing, and viewers will decide if the movie’s ultimately effective or not. Personally, I think it’s sweet, and I like it.
As for what the movie’s actually about, your response to the plot might very well be an indicator of whether Wadjda works for you. The title character is an 11-year-old Saudi girl looking to purchase a bike from a local store and beat pesky Abdullah, her boy counterpart (a mild fancy of hers, it’s cute), in a friendly-competitive race. As simple as the goal is, Wadjda is rejected her bike at every turn. Her mother won’t spend the money, preoccupied with husband-issues, and her community, plain unadjusted to female independence, never considers giving her the item she wants as a realistic possibility.
Deciding to raise the money for the bike herself, she enters a Quran recital competition with a big grand prize for first place. And here is where, as generic as the story seems, the film becomes the strongest in my opinion. It’s very representative of the life of a child, pointing to where it wants to go and not really mapping out how it will get there until the golden opportunity presents itself. It’s here where we find the marginalization of women to have the saddest impact, where the only way Wadjda believes she can become a free spirit is to sink further into the place that her teachers and family have cut out for her.
It was also a good choice to make the protagonist a young child for the contrast between youthful innocence and the inevitability of where her superiors plan to push her. This part isn’t really a bummer, though, and I’m glad it brings an unexpected sort of lightheartedness and even humor. Wadjda and Abdullah are illustrated in that “remember-when-we-were-kids” way or that “remember-when-kids-used-to-be-cool” way. Even when Wadjda struggles, the film feels playful and hopeful, keeping us engaged and eager to see where she goes next despite her obvious obstacles. Sometimes we need to have someone to route for instead of someone to hate.
If the movie were to include men more than it does, it would almost certainly be more vicious in nature. Wadjda’s watchful headmistress at her school, as stink-eyed as she gets, feels like an intermediary for installing gender norms at her worst. The one in-depth male characterization comes from Wadjda’s father, and the trouble he brings mostly comes through moderately heated conversations over the phone with her mother. There never really is a varied presence in the opposite gender instead of an implied presence in the accumulated rules and setbacks our characters, young and old, are held to.
And that’s where the opinionated observers will call this movie out on. Films based in the present, period, often go cut-throat. The most transparent ones hold nothing back, but with many, the subject digs the knife in, making sure we know it’s at least trying, really hard, to get the point to us.
What Wadjda says about the attitude of its setting toward this little girl is at the forefront, but it’s also not. Pretty tame on the surface, it settles for a PG-rating. But I don’t think it means this movie should be dismissed just based on the question of whether it’s raw enough to be effective. The themes throughout are mature, and their undercoverage is a subtle way of director al-Mansour telling us that a gender issue can also be an age issue as well. There are problems in Wadjda’s life, and simplifying them makes it easier for the character to make a big message in overcoming them as if it were a small one.
