No amount of beauty treatments can disguise the disturbing transformation of an elite Bangladeshi bride-to-be when her body reacts to the life being thrust upon her. It takes a bold director to combine body horror with Sylvia Plath, but then again Rubaiyat Hossain has never shied away from pushing the envelope. From her 2011 debut “Meherjaan,” widely attacked by conservative forces, to “Under Construction” and more recently “Made in Bangladesh,” the maverick director’s focus on gendered spaces and female sexuality have made her an outlier in Bangladeshi cinema.
With “The Difficult Bride” — which premiered in Venice and is seeing a highly successful festival run, including competition slots in Tokyo and London — she’s finally got her international breakthrough, benefiting from the current popularity of feminist body horror films yet beholden to no one in her lusciously tactile handling of fabric and skin. This heightened attention to surfaces is hardly random: Zaineen (Zaineen Chowdhury Karim, perfectly cast) is getting married, and that means she needs beauty treatments to make her look like a goddess. No blemish can be ignored, no extra ounce of flesh can be left flapping.
In the highly isolating world of Dhaka’s upper classes, the exterior is what matters (well, let’s face it, not just in Dhaka), and when the impossibly perfect beauty salon owner (Azmeri Haque, “Rehana Maryam Noor”) asks her clients if they’re happy, she’s not inquiring about their expectations for future bliss. From the outside, Zaineen’s life is enviable. She lives with her mother (Saberi Alam Motaher) in a gated community and has a chauffeur to take her wherever she wants.
With her American English inflection, occasional Zoom therapist and lapsed gym membership, she’s a card-carrying member of the global elite, hoping to get into the creative writing program at NYU. What’s more, fiancé Aarman (Dameer Khan) has all the makings of a perfect husband: he’s equally wealthy, supportive of her writing, handsome and good in bed. He’s not fond of her marijuana habit, but surely that can be worked out.
Beauty treatments begin before the engagement party, when Zaineen goes to the Mayfair salon to be assessed and prescribed a regimen of scrubs, peels, creams, injections and poultices, applied by Minoti (Reekita Nondine Shimu) under the owner’s watchful eye. The salon entrance’s resemblance to a funeral parlor is an early sign that something is amiss, and that’s before Zaineen begins hallucinating creatures that creep and slither, including lizards, catfish, snakes and snails whose viscous drag is evocatively captured thanks to Marie-Clotilde Chery’s effective sound design. As the wedding approaches, the bride-to-be’s anxiety manifests in disturbing ways: her skin is breaking out, her hair is shedding, nasty scratches disfigure her legs, and something appears to be wriggling under her skin.
When abusive cops arrest her for trying to score weed in a dangerous part of town, she offers them a bribe, equivalent to $20,000, which even Aarman finds excessive. But nothing will stop this wedding, including the ghost of a bride (Sunerah Binte Kamal) whose fate is a warning not to be ignored. Especially striking is how Zaineen moves from her hermetic apartment to the enclosed space of a chauffeur-driven car to Mayfair’s isolated temple of beauty or a park so devoid of people it must be part of a private country club.
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