The Difficult Bride

One of the most arresting voices in contemporary female-centred cinema, Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain (TIFF ’19’s Made in Bangladesh) possesses a unique gift for navigating the liminal spaces between the sacred and the sensual, the mythical and the mundane. Her latest examines the pressures applied to brides in a milieu where weddings demand a feminine ideal so rarified as to be asphyxiating.

“Happy?” a bridal consultant asks Zaineen as the pair gaze into a mirror at the bride-to-be’s immaculately made-up face, sculpted hair, and bejeweled body. The answer is complicated. In the weeks leading up to her wedding to the handsome, wealthy, “perfect” Aarman, Zaineen is overwhelmed by anxieties about her weight, her blemishes, and her insomnia. 

All perfectly normal feelings, she’s told. But what about the dreams and visions that increasingly haunt her, of catfish, snakes, and bloodied bodies? What about the mysterious scratches she discovers on her belly, or the feeling of something moving under her skin?  Zaineen is a modern woman, but it seems like some unseen, perhaps ancient force is trying to send her a message.

The Difficult Bride is awash in striking images — at one point a snail traverses the sole of a red spike heel — but there’s a way in which the film’s true potency lies in the unseen, in its heroine’s indomitable psyche. This is a story about the power of female volition in the face of rigid cultural and familial expectations — and about what happens when that power is suddenly unleashed. 

ROBYN CITIZEN