Review: In ‘What Will People Say,’ Tyranny Begins at Home
By Teo Bugbee
When “What Will People Say” begins, Nisha is a bright and beautiful teenager, as much the ideal assimilated daughter of Norway as she is the ideal daughter of her Pakistani immigrant parents. At home, Nisha (the newcomer Maria Mozhdah, in an arresting performance) speaks Urdu and diligently maintains her grades so that she might one day become a doctor. But at school, she is indistinguishable from her Norwegian friends who wear makeup, sneak out of their homes at night and lust after boys while dancing to techno music.
After Nisha spends a clandestine night out, her father, Mirza (Adil Hussain), catches her bringing a boy home. Her parallel lives collapse into chaos. Mirza beats the boy, who was not yet Nisha’s lover. With the help of extended family, he kidnaps his daughter and sends her to Pakistan, where she can be watched with surveillant strictness by her aunt and uncle.
Her family burns her passport, holding her under threat of abandonment, public humiliation and even death. As a result of her exile, Nisha is subjected to traumatic ordeals with such frequency and intensity that it becomes tempting to retreat into the false belief that it should be impossible for such terrible things to happen to one person. But the film is based in part on the director Iram Haq’s own experience of being kidnapped by her parents and sent to Pakistan. Her familiarity grounds even the story’s most horrific details in reality.
Ms Haq builds suspense as Nisha’s attempts to escape force her to negotiate between her two cultures. In Pakistan, Nisha’s European assumptions that the streets are safer than her family home are met with dire consequences. Even when Nisha is finally able to return to Norway, she must represent both herself and her parents in meetings with child protective services because of the language barrier. Her role as a translator gives Nisha’s family an opportunity to monitor her precious opportunity for rescue.
Drawing attention to the cultural differences between Nisha and her parents, Ms Haq emphasizes the compounding pressures facing immigrant families. Nisha’s parents try to uphold the appearance of traditionalism despite their distance from home, and their anxiety at cultural loss is transferred onto their daughter (and her developing sexuality). In a resolute acknowledgment of the oppression that too many young women face at home, the film portrays the family structure as the enforcing unit of feminine docility. Here, love is another form of bondage. – The New York Times
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