This review was initially published after the 2019 Venice Film Festival premiere of “The Perfect Candidate.”
As someone with a side gig on the programming team of an LGBT film festival, I’ve noticed that, while the coming-out drama is often tired and clichéd coming from American filmmakers, it can be thrilling when one is produced a part of the world where an honest conversation about queer lives is in its early stages.
It’s not a put-down, then, when I say that Saudi Arabia’s “The Perfect Candidate” reminds me of a cycle of Jane Fonda films from the 1970s and 80s — notably “Coming Home,” “The China Syndrome” and “9 to 5” — where she plays women who fight back against their understanding of the world and discover their own voices in the process. And Jane never had to do it while wearing a niqab.
With exquisite subtlety, director Haifaa Al...
As someone with a side gig on the programming team of an LGBT film festival, I’ve noticed that, while the coming-out drama is often tired and clichéd coming from American filmmakers, it can be thrilling when one is produced a part of the world where an honest conversation about queer lives is in its early stages.
It’s not a put-down, then, when I say that Saudi Arabia’s “The Perfect Candidate” reminds me of a cycle of Jane Fonda films from the 1970s and 80s — notably “Coming Home,” “The China Syndrome” and “9 to 5” — where she plays women who fight back against their understanding of the world and discover their own voices in the process. And Jane never had to do it while wearing a niqab.
With exquisite subtlety, director Haifaa Al...
- 5/15/2021
- by Alonso Duralde
- The Wrap
A lot has changed in Saudi Arabia since Haifaa Al-Mansour last made a film in her home country. Wadjda, Al-Mansour’s 2012 debut, was the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and since then she’s worked in the US (Nappily Ever After) and UK (Mary Shelley). In the interim, Saudi Arabia passed laws that allowed cinemas to open in the country, women gained the right to vote, and in 2018 the country finally allowed women to drive. The Perfect Candidate, Al-Mansour’s keenly observed new film, examines a society in which women are acclimatizing to increased agency but still have a long way to go to equal rights.
A woman’s right behind the wheel hangs over the opening shot, which sees Dr. Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) drive up a muddy, disheveled road to the hospital where she works. Her shiny blue vehicle allows her the agency of traveling to and from work.
A woman’s right behind the wheel hangs over the opening shot, which sees Dr. Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) drive up a muddy, disheveled road to the hospital where she works. Her shiny blue vehicle allows her the agency of traveling to and from work.
- 5/13/2021
- by Orla Smith
- The Film Stage
It must have been exactly what conservative Saudis feared would happen: Let a woman like Haifaa Al-Mansour direct a movie (and the first movie ever shot in Saudi Arabia at that), and a few years later she’ll be back directing another. Only this time, there’ll be actual cinemas in the Kingdom that can show it. Let a 10-year-old girl like Wadjda, the eponymous heroine of Al-Mansour’s delightful 2012 debut, covet a bicycle, and next thing you know, women will be driving. In cars. Progress happens slowly, in little ticks and tocks of change.
- 5/12/2021
- by Jessica Kiang
- Rollingstone.com
It’s hard to know who’s the perfect audience for “The Perfect Candidate,” Haifaa Al Mansour’s first Saudi film since “Wadjda.” Even more than in that debut hit, her latest is clearly designed to demythologize the Kingdom, taking a host of cultural signifiers and parading them out in the cinematic equivalent of billboard-sized letters to show that Saudi society is heterogeneous and mutable. The script is so simplistic in how it runs through a checklist of cultural practices — women’s dress, gendered spaces, the role of music — that it reduces the people themselves to unsophisticated representatives of change, and yet its welcome message of female empowerment will be embraced by Western audiences pleased to see women removing their niqabs. How it will play regionally is difficult to guess, though it’s encouraging that cinemas now exist in Saudi Arabia for locals to see it, too.
While “Wadjda,” with its scrappy protagonist,...
While “Wadjda,” with its scrappy protagonist,...
- 8/29/2019
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
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