The Perfect Candidate

Just as a ten-year-old girl used her smarts to get a bicycle in Haifaa Al Mansour's debut, Wadjda (2012), so small-town doctor Maryam (Mila Al Zahrani) employs her wiles to repair the pocked road leading to her hospital in the writer/director's fourth feature. However, Maryam has to go the long way round, as repeated brushes with Saudi Arabia's patriarchal system prompt her to run in the local council election against the very man blocking the roadworks. Echoing the Iranian films about female empowerment that were made in the mid-1990s, The Perfect Candidate may not be particularly nuanced, as Al Mansour strives to highlight the numerous facets of daily life that are governed by rigid gender diktats. However, by exploring the contrasting support that Maryam receives from her own sisters, Al Mansour reveals the restrictions determining the nature, necessity and pace of reform. The satire is studied and the ending contrived, but this still feels like a film that needed to be made.