The Joy of Old People in Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2022)

Content Creator Dexter Lok finds joy in Joyland (2022), Saim Sadiq’s debut film which was screened at last semester’s Queer Week!

Queer Week was an absolute blast. We had a stunning performance by local drag queen Bae Bratz, followed by sharings from ground-up advocacy groups Action for AIDS Singapore and The T Project before ending off with Saim Sadiq’s beautiful debut film, Joyland (2022).

I loved this lineup for our final screening of the semester. It was all very gay—as in queer, but also as in very joyful—and Sadiq’s film was a pertinent reminder that queer desire and intimacy is still a luxury that not everyone can afford. Most of our members, too, praised the work for its intricate exploration of queer sexuality. 

Yet, in focusing our attention solely on queer desire, we seem to have overlooked another taboo desire in Pakistani society: the desire for companionship between the elderly Amanullah (protagonist Haider’s wheelchair-bound father) and Fayyaz (the family’s neighbour). Unlike Haider and Biba who defy the patriarchal restraints on their bodies to seek companionship and intimacy between them, the elderly folk instead play into their roles within the traditional Pakistani family structure to navigate their desire for companionship with one another.

Although Amanullah was presented as a wheelchair user from the start, I was prone to overlooking his vulnerability as a physically disabled person. He was more of a patriarchal authority to be obeyed, a figure who looms over the family and insisted his children and in-laws upheld traditional patriarchal roles.

I was also struck by how Amanullah confronts Haider about potential offspring when the latter gives his father a massage. In this moment of nakedness, Amanullah reinforces his desire for his son to conform to the traditional masculine convention of starting a family and having children like his brother. Yet, in such an intimate moment, we forget that Amanullah is very much dependent on Haider for his cleanliness and care. 

When his wheelchair is stuck the night that Mumtaz and Nucchi go to Joyland, we finally see how Amanullah’s immobility brings him shame and humiliation. He wets himself in front of Fayyaz, leaving him stunned and resistant towards Fayyaz’s initial attempts to help clean him up. Perhaps he too has forgotten how dependent he is on his children for his daily caregiving needs.

In this light, his demands that Mumtaz stays home should Haider work is also a means for him to ensure that he has a personal caregiver who can aid with his daily needs. He makes his demand by leveraging his authority as the family head, thereby using his patriarchal status to preserve his dignity as an old man who would otherwise have to confront his disability with shame. Upholding the patriarchy, then, serves to both reinforce expected gender dynamics and to help him renegotiate his vulnerability as a wheelchair user.

Similarly, Fayyaz leans into the role of the caregiver to carve out an opportunity for herself to visit Amanullah. Her bringing of snacks and desserts —an act of caregiving and love —provides her a socially permissible means to achieve a sense of individuality that is separate from the traditional role she occupies in her family.

This, of course, is nothing surprising. Fayyaz makes several visits to the Rama family with her snacks, and her earlier visits to the household are only captured in fleeting scenes. For most of the film, Fayyaz’s visits to the Rama household are taken for granted, and her desire for companionship is something that we see but possibly do not notice until her son confronts her about her stayover with Amanullah. 

“Stay at home,” her son barks at her. “Why is that so hard?”

Here, we are only given a rear shot of Fayyaz’s son. Everyone else is seated by the sides of the room, their expressions clearly lit by the morning sun pouring through the windows. Fayyaz’s son is merely a figure from shoulder up, a talking silhouette as dark and cold as his family’s expectation for their widowed mother to merely exist within the confines of her own house. 

Fayyaz has no other means of socialising outside her family, and this is made more obvious with her son asking why she cannot sit still and watch Netflix at home. Her visits, under the guise of bringing food to a neighbour, thus provide an opportunity for her to be useful to Amanullah by spending time and caring for him. This in turn provides an opportunity to escape the haunting loneliness of her own house where she is “almost a ghost now”. 

The final blow to both the elderly comes when Fayyaz pleads to stay by Amanullah’s side. Her son storms off in a rage, asking her to stay with the Ramas since she likes being here so much. In turn, she begs the family to take her in. She suggests an unorthodox but possibly sustainable future—one where she stays to look after Amanullah, which maintains both her individuality and Amanullah’s need for a caregiver. Yet, Amanullah simply asks her to leave, succumbing to the fear of social scandals and neighbourly gossip.

Sadiq delicately tapers off their relationship. Fayyaz is simply seen walking down the alley accompanied by Haider, and then never appears on screen again. Afterwards, Amanullah’s presence on screen also diminishes, actualising Fayyaz’s worst nightmare of fading away from society.

From then on, Joyland leaves its elderly behind as characters with stories who cannot live up to the more dramatic lives of its younger characters. Just like how Sadiq is critical of patriarchal suffocation on the elderly and the lack of opportunities to have a healthy social life in their twilight years, I cannot help but feel complicit in the suffocation of these elderly characters, through my own forgetting of these elderly characters and their plight of never being able to sate their desire for companionship.