“Rehana Maryam Noor,” the second feature film from director Abdullah Mohammad Saad, the first Bangladesh film featured in Cannes, is both a dogged pursuit for justice and a sturdy character study. The titular character Dr. Rehana (Azmeri Haque Badhon), is an overworked Assistant Professor to Professor Arefin (Kazi Sami Hassan) in a modest medical college. A woman of scruples, she expels a student during an exam for writing notes on the back of her ruler, reigning over the classroom with an ironclad gaze that denotes her obsession with upright morals.
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The stern teacher, a Bangledesh widow and single mother to a daughter in first grade, Emu (Afia Jahin Jaima), desperately works to balance her job with her parenting responsibilities. Both elements are thrown into greater discord when Rehana stumbles onto a scandal: Arefin is pressuring female students into sex for grades. One, in particular, Annie (Afia Tabassum Borno), is afraid to file a complaint against the professor, leaving Rehana to bear the weight of seeking justice.
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Saad is never in a rush. Rather “Rehana” teases out every minute detail, allowing time for initially tepid emotional undercurrents to boil to the surface. These include Arefin’s abuse of Annie, Rehana’s fraught family dynamics with her brother and young daughter, and her own possible experiences with sexual assault. These threads intertwine under a blue gauze lighting from DP Tumil Tamijul, which communicates the pressures felt by the mother and the victims of the school’s predator, and the slow disintegration of Rehana’s tact as she obsessively chases retribution against Arefin, even at the expense of keeping up with the struggles Emu is experiencing at school.
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For her part, Azmeri Haque Badhon carves out a tense, unflinching performance as the film’s probing lead. Like a missile shot from a submarine, she cuts through the obfuscation of the aquamarine lighting and the narrative’s most frustrating events to hit her precise target. Her devastating effect is made all the more impressive considering how often Saad’s lens captures her at a distance: either framing her in full two shots, enveloping her in shadows, or placing her in the blurred background of a shallow depth of field. The evocative compositions translate how powerless she feels in the situation and the greater, secret anxiety lurking deep within her.
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She sustains a story that doesn’t tread much new ground. Characters like Annie discuss the helplessness they experience when reporting sexual harassment. But they read at a very surface level. Saad instead has greater success meticulously parsing the bureaucratic inequities that make workplace protection difficult to attain, that make toxic, sexist environments all too easy to cultivate (a series of taut meetings with the college’s principal explains as much). Badhon embellishes these meditations with a smirking yet downcast demeanor, artfully demonstrating the darker psychological components of her character.
Likewise, Hassan as Arefin is equally as cutting. And Hassan and Badhon have a great give-and-go, a relationship so fraught icebergs might as well be floating between them. The animosity they show is further developed by Saad’s studious lens, one where the dominant character often speaks out of frame. Jaima as Rehana’s daughter, also gives an assured child performance as the narrative shifts from a story of justice to one of resignation.
Saad’s sharp psychological character study doesn’t provide the cathartic ending audiences might crave. The perspective is too cold, too ambiguous to give such easy answers. The film, instead, serves as a showcase for Badhon and a platform to examine the limits of unbendable ethics in a sexist culture. It’s why the last shot: one where mother protects daughter and possibly herself, leaves such an open wound. Making “Rehana Maryam Noor” the kind of edgy, uncomfortable story worth discovering. [B]
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