It was so incredibly odd and disorienting to see the streets I grew up in, everything from the acres of dust to the constant construction, the kabsa, the currency, the goddamned PS2, the casual anti-desi racism, the heat, on the big screen.
Waad Mohammed & Abdulrehman Al Gohani gave so much life to this. They're also '99 kids, some of the last to truly feel the presence of the religious police in big cities. 5 years ago, the religious police wanted to marry off my cousin for smoking a cigarette with a boy; a month ago I was out with my boyfriend at the time, in public, no 3abaya, and nobody could say anything. Soon, this movie, and my childhood, will be relegated to an epoch of Saudi life categorized more accurately as "past" than "present", and that is dreadfully existential for me.
This faltered in the third act, which I spent entirely on my phone. Maybe this isn't a fair rating because I already read the book and knew what was gonna happen, but it didn't do very much for me emotionally. I wasn't attached to the characters as much as I wish I was, and I can't explain it, but I feel like this movie needed a louder, more jarring scene that just wasn't present. Or maybe I just associate life in Saudi with dust, monotony, and more dust.
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