Jessica Kiang At the memorial gathering for her husband Adnan, 30-year-old Nawal (a riveting Mouna Hawa) is offered many empty words of support and so-called comfort by friends and family. “When a woman loses her husband, she loses her lover, her partner, everything in her life,” clucks a commiserating neighbor.
What she fails to mention is how much is not lost, but can, under the Jordanian legal system so scathingly exposed in Amjad Al Rasheed‘s fluid, gripping “Inshallah a Boy,” be taken.
Employment, home, child, dignity – all can be summarily stripped from a widow who has committed the grievous crime of never having borne a son.
Al Rasheed’s precision-tooled movie is a social-realist drama rendered as an escape thriller where the labyrinth that Nawal must navigate is the Jordanian social order itself, a massive bureaucratic, patriarchal maze designed to ensure that any woman trying to evade its clutches will batter herself to exhaustion sooner or later against one of its deviously placed dead ends.
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