It’s remarkable enough that trailblazing short filmmaker and documentarian Haifaa Al Mansour was able to capture – with unerring clarity and poise, despite real peril – her debut fictional feature on location in Riyadh, a place where cinema exhibition has long been outlawed. But the fact that the first full-length movie to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia is a wittily subversive, nimble feminist gem makes Wadjda one to celebrate.
Young newcomer Waad Mohammed excels as the title character: a sparky, street-smart girl whose instinctive enjoyment of life requires small acts of defiance against an oppressive society – such as making tapes of Western pop music, forgetting to wear a headscarf, and inking the white parts of her Converse sneakers to bypass school’s drab black shoes rule. She wants to buy a bike (frowned upon for females) in order to race the boy next door, so enters a Koran recitation contest offering a cash prize for the winner. Meanwhile, her mother (the wonderful Reem Adbullah) is facing a graver inequality: unable to conceive another child, she’s scared that Wadjda’s father is going to take a second wife, one who can bear him a son. Marked by scenarios that are both laugh-out-loud absurd and shockingly unfair, the individual storylines converge on a bittersweet ending that’s sheer poetry, with an implicit anger at its core.
