QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM THE RED SEA

Twenty-five-year-old Saba (Mehazabien Chowdhury) lives with her wheelchair-bound mother Shirin (Rokeya Prachy) inside a shabby flat, in a nondescript high-rise in Dhaka. The capital of Bangladesh – a city of more than 10 million inhabitants and one of the most densely populated places on earth – is a dark, impoverished and unforgiving place. There is little time for solidarity. And there are options for leisure and respite, except for a little restaurant in the park, or drinking beer on a busy flyover. People such as Saba are devoted to earning a living. It is survival that defines the existence of most Dhakais. Shirin is well aware of this, and she has clearly lost her desire to live. Existing for the sole purpose of breathing isn’t living, she asserts.

The old woman is confined to her humble dwelling, except when her health takes a turn for the worse, and Saba has to call an ambulance. The doctors tell the daughter that her mother’s heart is on the verge of a collapse, and that she has roughly a month for a surgery. The operation costs a whopping 300,000 taka (roughly £2,000), an enormous sum for people who barely have enough to eat. Saba begs her mum to sell her flat, but Shirin does not budge. She wants the daughter to inherit the apartment, thereby vouching for her future stability. Conversely, our protagonist’s top priority is her mother’s survival.

The central topic of Saba is boundless mother-daughter love. Saba and and Shirin’s commitment to one another is so strong that sometimes they hurt each other. Saba nearly causes her mother to have a heart attack while coercing her into having heart surgery. And Shirin is wilfully unpleasant and judgmental because she wishes to be a disposable burden. She fails to understand that however heavy the burden she might be, Saba still loves her and will do everything within her reach to keep her mother alive. Failed by men, the state and the health system, the two women must somehow forge ahead together – fighting like ferrets in a sack.

Saba begs an uncle for some money, but her pleas fall into deaf ears. Her father vanished decades earlier, for reasons that are never revealed (the two women simply refuse to discuss the topic in more detail). So she finds a job a small hookah joint. This is an underground place, where people can engage in small subversive pleasures. Bangladesh is a Muslim country, and locals are prohibited from consuming alcohol. She befriends the manager Ankur (Mostafa Monwar), who empathises with her suffering. There is a spark of romance in the air. But how could love come to fruition when Saba must devote all of her time to work and changing her mum’s nappies?

The social topics are also pervasive. This is a corrupt society, where micro-achievements are defined by one’s ability to pay their way up. Religion stops people from extracting pleasure from their life: Ankur and Saba are nearly arrested for possessing a bottle of beer because Islam forbids drinking, and they cannot meet at his place because his devout landlords do not accept that an unmarried woman and a man should share the same space. Social inequalities also play a role in perpetuating’s these people’s thankless equalities: the television reports that that the rich continue to enjoy a low tax regime. The movie also raises a pertinent reflection: is living mandatory? Should we force our loved ones to stay alive long after their desire to live has vanished?

First-time director Maksud Hossain creates a robust piece of filmmaking, oscillating between bleak social realism and more conventional melodrama. The actors are very strong, and the film rivets viewers for the standard runtime of 95 minutes. The story is familiar, the storytelling is conventional, and the ending is very predictable. In other words, this is a satisfactory drama, even if you’ve seen it all before. The biggest novelty is Dhaka, a city rarely portrayed in international cinema. Worth a viewing.

Saba shows in the Main Competition of the 4th Red Sea International Film Festival.