‘Inshallah a Boy’ Review: A Gripping Social Drama About Systemic Oppression That Morphs into a Masterful Thriller
07.10.2023 - 22:05
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang At the memorial gathering for her husband Adnan, 30-year-old Nawal (a riveting Mouna Hawa) is offered many empty words of support and so-called comfort by friends and family. “When a woman loses her husband, she loses her lover, her partner, everything in her life,” clucks a commiserating neighbor.
What she fails to mention is how much is not lost, but can, under the Jordanian legal system so scathingly exposed in Amjad Al Rasheed‘s fluid, gripping “Inshallah a Boy,” be taken. Employment, home, child, dignity – all can be summarily stripped from a widow who has committed the grievous crime of never having borne a son.
Al Rasheed’s precision-tooled movie is a social-realist drama rendered as an escape thriller where the labyrinth that Nawal must navigate is the Jordanian social order itself, a massive bureaucratic, patriarchal maze designed to ensure that any woman trying to evade its clutches will batter herself to exhaustion sooner or later against one of its deviously placed dead ends. But Nawal, though initially timid and thrown into a tailspin of shock and grief by Adnan’s premature demise, is not the type to be easily bullied out of the few things she knows are hers by right: her small, mouse-infested Amman apartment, custody of her daughter Nora (Seleena Rababah) and a pickup truck that Nawal cannot drive but, for reasons perhaps even she does not understand, stubbornly refuses to sell.
When it transpires that there are four outstanding truck payments still due to her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Omari), she initially assumes Rifqi will grant her a grace period. Nawal’s job, working as an in-home nurse for the elderly matriarch of a rich family, does not pay handsomely, and keeping it requires
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