A Bangladeshi Debut About Feeling Trapped

A sense of financial and personal stagnation permeates “Saba,” the Bangladeshi social drama from first-time director Maksud Hossain. A strong (if stylistically straightforward) debut, it follows 25-year-old Saba (Mehazabien Chowdhury), who struggles to make ends meet while looking after her ailing, paraplegic single mother Shirin (Rokeya Prachy), whose own frustrations often explode in Saba’s direction.

To pay for Shirin’s life-saving surgery, Saba finds a waitressing job at a seedy hookah lounge in Dhaka — a position in which, she’s told, women tend not to last — with long hours that only complicate her caregiving duties. It’s one indignity after the next, both for Saba, who has to beg for the job to begin with, and for Shirin, who has no choice but to wait in bed until Saba can bathe her and change her diaper.

Tales of such misfortune run the risk of veering into pity porn, but Hossain draws the situation (and its associated frustrations) from real experience. Upon the death of his father-in-law, the director’s wife and co-writer Trilora Khan became sole caregiver to her disabled mother; “Saba” is a work of fiction, but it comes from a real, painful place in which there’s little nobility to be mined from the mere act of keeping someone alive. Beyond a point, it becomes a laborious task for both parties when disability infrastructure is scarce.

Shirin will not (and cannot) leave her building, since she needs to be carried down its narrow staircase. So, during the day, Saba has no choice but to lock her inside. Shirin’s cramped apartment is her physical prison, and it becomes an emotional prison for Saba, whose thoughts are always back home, as she worries about how to slip away to check on her mom. The only person who understands her predicament is her manager at work, Ankur (Mostafa Monwar): a middle-aged man whose apparent strictness soon gives way to greater depth once Saba gets to know him.

There are, at times, romantic implications to their camaraderie, but what really matters is their mutual recognition of each other’s struggles. Like Saba and Shirin, Ankur feels bound to a city that has no love and few opportunities for him, forcing him to run an illicit liquor business on the side while he saves money to move abroad. Everyone in the film is just trying to get by. It isn’t long before the characters are forced to consider how stepping on one another might even help them get ahead. The system has imbued them with the potential for something ugly.

Such is the plight of Bangladesh’s lower and middle classes. Although the film was made before the country’s recent protests fully erupted, it belongs to the same wellspring of frustrations over financial stability that drove those demonstrations. This makes “Saba” a pressing work of social realism, expressing — in quiet but poignant ways — the tenor of the nation’s disaffected youth.

To capture this story and its political subtext, Hossain often observes at a distance, in the vein of the Dardenne brothers, though his control of mood and emotion isn’t quite as finessed (at least, not yet). The story moves quickly, allowing the actors to perform its drama with commitment and aplomb. The filmmaking is often rote — its framing presents, but seldom accentuates; the editing is functional and literal, rather than rhythmic. But when Chowdhury’s close-ups become the camera’s focus, the actress is able to craft a multifaceted portraiture of a woman on the brink; it’s hard not to care deeply about Saba.  

The film has wildly interesting characters and subject matter, and comes ever-so-close to being great, if only it would hold on its drama a little longer. That said, it remains an accomplished debut regardless, and an effective political mirror to a fraught moment in modern Bangladeshi history.