“If I had seen something like this when I was growing up, I would have felt less alone,” the director Minhal Baig said of her film “Hala.”
Baig’s coming-of-age story, streaming on Apple TV Plus after a theatrical run in November, follows a Pakistani-American 17-year-old testing the boundaries of her Muslim faith, familial obligations and teenage hormones.
From its opening moments, it is clear this film isn’t going to be chaste or avoid the challenges of straddling two worlds: We see the title character masturbating in the bath, only to be interrupted by her mother, who proceeds to scold her for missing the first prayer of the day. The scene is a pure delight, mostly because Baig allows this young Muslim woman to explore her sexuality.
I also had a hard time navigating life as a young Bengali woman and a Muslim in America, and so I identify with Hala (played by Geraldine Viswanathan) in her pursuit of a white love interest and her struggles with her faith and parents. I’m 31 now, and at Hala’s age, I was desperate to be a “normal” American white girl. Growing up in Queens among other South Asians, I innately understood whiteness to be like the pair of aspirational jeans that were always a few sizes too small.
Baig, 30, who was born and raised in Chicago to parents from Pakistan, gets at that duality in her film. Hala says she is of “two halves,” of two equally authentic selves. At times, she can seem like a walking contradiction, but this is what it is like to navigate two cultures.
“There were things that when I was writing it, I knew that if I share this with my family, it’s going to change the story and then the story is not going to be honest,” Baig said. Her family still has not watched her movie, which has received mostly positive reviews (a New York Times Critic’s Pick). When she started writing, she was trying to process her father’s sudden death in 2013.
“Losing my dad made me realize, all of my life, priorities have been centered around these incredibly materialist, consumerist ideas of success. I unfortunately believed that the more that I succeed professionally, that that will translate to happiness, and it didn’t work,” said Baig, who has directed the short films “After Sophie” and “Pretext,” and was a staff writer for “Ramy” and a story editor for “Bojack Horseman.”
She continued: “I started from a place of writing these vignettes from when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. That was the foundation of the screenplay. I wrote the script, and then I spent two years at home just dealing with grief and working retail jobs.”
While the movie has been dismissed for lacking a nuanced story line and character development that doesn’t rely on religious tropes, I identified with “Hala,” particularly how it shows tenderness between the protagonist and her parents. She is a brat to her very loving mother (Purbi Joshi), and her father (Azad Khan) disappoints them in the most universal of ways.
Many of the film’s critics said it reinforced problematic stereotypes — foreign parents with accents, threats of arranged marriage and girls reluctantly wearing hijabs. Because of this, many assumed “Hala” was from a white director. Others were dismayed that it did indeed come from a Pakistani-American filmmaker.
“In independent film, it has to come from this very personal and passionate place. And so when I read some of the criticism,” Baig said, referring to those who questioned whether her story had come from the studio, “that’s just not true.” She added that all of her department heads were women and over 70 percent of her crew were women. “I had a lot of creative control on a project even though it was the first really big project that I got to do,” she said.
This sort of criticism, however, invariably arrives when a movie features an underrepresented group. Experiences of Islam and how parents relate (or don’t relate) to their children are not monolithic. Muslim Americans crave seeing ourselves onscreen, and we rightly need more than one narrative.
“The expectations are very high whenever there’s a story that features a Muslim character,” Baig said. “The Muslim diaspora is massive, and there are so many different things that people want to see that are a closer reflection of their lives. The critique that there is gatekeeping and that certain kinds of stories are not being pushed out — that’s absolutely true. But that is not something that I, as an individual, can systematically change.”
Baig continued, referring to the negative comments: “It’s a tough thing to read, but I know that it comes from a place of pain. It comes from a pain of, ‘I want something that confirms and affirms my values and the way I’ve lived my life and the experiences I’ve had.’ That’s exactly what led me to make this movie because I had the same pain. The contact I had with Muslim characters was that they were all men, and it was centered through their perspective.”
Throughout the movie I kept thinking how I used to avoid sharing stories about my family’s ugly, human moments because I was afraid of what people outside my community would think. I was an ambassador for my people, whether Muslim or Bengali or South Asian, and I didn’t want their first impression of someone like me to be a negative one. The burden of sanitizing my life added even more stress to the pressure of being a model minority.
The film has also been criticized for perpetuating the idea that a white man is a trophy for women of color — Hala’s love interest, Jesse, is a blonde, amateur poet who also skateboards. I have spent my adulthood interrogating past definitions of beauty, happiness and freedom. And my adult self wanted to roll my eyes at that choice for a character like Hala, unsure of herself and where she belongs, but my teenage self was wide-eyed in adoration for him.
For some, including myself, there was a time that a white man desiring you meant — to steal a line from the Broadway drama “Slave Play,” about interracial couples — you won the “prize.” (Not to mention that it’s a message conveyed repeatedly in movies, TV series and advertising.) It showed you were worth a damn and, finally, maybe as beautiful as the skinny white girl.
Ultimately, “Hala” is not really a love story. She doesn’t choose Jesse — in part because of a perceived allegiance to her family that’s appropriate of her age. But it reminded me that I have been the brown girl pining over a white boy. And I have been the brown woman who has rejected white acceptance.
“Hala” brought these contradictions together for me. I’m still exorcising my demons over what it means to be “a good Muslim” and how my parents chose to raise me. I often feel like a coward: There are many facets of my life I do not share with my parents. I will never agree with them that praying five times daily is a marker for getting into heaven.
My Bengali girlfriends used to call me an “ABCD,” American-born confused Desi, because I never cared about Bollywood and didn’t have a wider South Asian network. I now see why who I am and where I’m from gives me a power that no person can dull.
In Hala, I saw myself at 17: a chameleon trying to survive.
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