Reviews
Dukhtar | Review
Not Without My Dukhtar: Nathaniel’s Debut a Sobering Drama
In the mountainous regions of Pakistan, a pair of rival tribes seem locked in an endless cycle of vengeance. Tribal chieftain Daulat Khan (Asif Khan) pleads with rival leader Tor Gul (Abdullah Jaan) to make peace, to which Tor Gul accepts if Daulat Khan will offer his ten year old daughter Zainab (Saleha Aref) in marriage. Khan accepts, but his much younger wife Allah Rakhi (Samiya Mumtaz), whom he won through a similar arrangement fifteen years prior, seems to snap out of her stupor at the news. She refuses to let Zainab, who is teaching her mother English, be married off to a man that’s old enough to be her grandfather, and so she escapes with her daughter in tow. This causes great drama amongst the tribes for Allah has dishonored both sides, and will be killed by whoever finds her first. Stowing themselves away on the top of a truck, they appeal to sympathetic driver Sohail for assistance. Begrudgingly, he agrees. But Tor Gul’s men, along with an old suitor of Allah’s, aren’t far behind them. Meanwhile, the trio tries to reach out to Allah’s own mother, who she hasn’t been allowed to speak with for fifteen years.
Though hardly Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) or any number of other similarly minded titles, Dukhtar seems most important as evidence of the possibility of successful rebellion from one of many regions that still operate as if in the Dark Ages as concerns equality and female empowerment. This in itself, the possibility of this film’s existence, is a powerful statement. However, it also has the aura of a first wave artifact, a novelty that wears thin during the film’s second half.
Samiya Mumtaz manages to be rather mesmerizing as a soft-spoken wife that surprises herself with her own survival skills. In the film’s most drastic moment, she places a gun to her daughter’s head, announcing she’d rather kill the girl rather than return to the hell that awaits them. It’s also the film’s most distilled moment of clarity—these women in lands governed by tribal honor are still treated as cattle. But the film settles into a classic cat and mouse set of sequences, finally bringing us to the precipice of tragedy. A symbolic, heavy-handed (literally) device closes the film, that’s about as touching as it is unforgivably cliché.
Reviewed on September 5th at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival – Discovery Programme. 93 Minutes
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆