Azmeri Haque Badhon’s Searing Performance Bolsters Bleak Bangladeshi Drama Rehana
The first thing you notice about Rehana is how blue it all is. Not blue as in risqué, or blue as in melancholy—each surface, each face, is bathed in a drab hue of cobalt or navy or cerulean. To call it color-grading feels like an understatement; this is more like color-smothering. And that overwhelming blanket of blue, literally and figuratively, shades everything.
Within this suffocating world resides the titular Rehana (Azmeri Haque Badhon), a professor at a medical school in Bangladesh. From the moment we meet her, furiously berating her brother via voice message (“Why are you not answering? Are you dead?!”), we know she’s at the end of her tether. A widow, she’s not only charged with the sole financial responsibility of her five-year-old daughter Emu (Afia Jahin Jaima), but of her unemployed brother and ailing parents. She rarely gets to see any of them, because she’s always working.
And her life at work is hardly a nourishing one. She has no real friends. While her male colleague Arefin (Kazi Sami Hassan) is beloved by the pupils, Rehana is disliked; her decision to expel a weeping student from an exam who’d written notes on her ruler proves particularly unpopular. Arefin suggests she should have been given another chance, but Rehana knows that once these students graduate, and have life and death choices to make, they won’t get second chances. So she can’t coddle feelings—the stakes are too high.
One evening, still at the school as usual, Rehana is walking past Arefin’s office when she hears something, and peeks through the door. Moments later, Annie (Afia Tabassum Borno), a clearly upset student, rushes out. He’s assaulted her. Rehana witnessed it. But Annie doesn’t want to say anything—she can already see where it all would lead, with the power imbalance and the inevitable victim-blaming. Rehana, though, is determined that he shouldn’t get away with it. So she hatches a plan: She’ll pretend that she was the one that Arefin assaulted. With so much on her plate, what’s this one extra thing? Inevitably, her scheme doesn’t go the way she intends.
Rehana, the sophomore feature from writer/director Abdullah Mohammad Saad, was the first Bangladeshi movie to be selected for Cannes, where it received a standing ovation. The clear #MeToo theme in Saad’s narrative undoubtedly helped get the film noticed on the global stage, and it’s the nuance to his handling of that theme—with the exception of a couple of unfortunately heavy-handed exchanges between secondary players—which makes it such an interesting work.
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