Except for a twitch of her lips, you can hardly see Rehana smile through the film, named after her – Rehana Maryam Noor. She is mostly disturbed, angry or frustrated, and rarely pleasant even with her little daughter. Then you look at Azmeri Haque Badhon, walking down the lawn outside her hotel in Thiruvananthapuram, colourful and bursting with energy, “loud” in her own words – a stark contradiction to Rehana. How director Abdullah Mohammad Saad thought of her when he wrote Rehana’s story still surprises her, she says a day after the Bangladeshi feature was screened as the opening film at the 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Thiruvananthapuram.
She is overwhelmed by the attention she’s getting here, Badhon says, describing the audience as sensible and respectful like at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film was screened last November. After the award though, she had a nervous breakdown, she says. Another episode of the mental health problems she has been fighting for 19 years, you realise, as she opens up.
To talk about Rehana, Badhon has to go back to her own life, to the time when she was a teenager – in love with someone, but forced to marry another. “I was 19. It was horrible for me. I was suicidal, clinically depressed,” says the Bangladeshi actor, who is 38 now.
Among her many losses was a discontinuation of her dental studies at the time. “My then in-laws thought that I no longer needed to go to a medical school because I was a wife now. If I wanted to, I could take a ‘BA’.”
She admits that, at the time, she was so busy pleasing everyone around her that she hardly thought of what she wanted to do. It was after her marriage failed that she began to think about it. “It is only now that terms like marital rape have become so common. Back then when I told my parents that I was unhappy and didn’t want to be with my husband, they did not understand. I became suicidal. My brother took me to a psychiatrist, who admitted me to a rehabilitation facility. When I got out, I saw a billboard for a beauty contest. It said the winner of the contest can play a role in a film based on a book by Humayun Ahmed, a noted Bangladeshi novelist. I decided that I will tell him my story and then die. So, I registered for the contest.”
That decision changed the course of Badhon’s life. She became a runner up and won enough money to see herself through the rest of her dental course, which she had taken a break from. She went on to act in television dramas (“I played the lead in nine TV series”), and then a film. But she hardly enjoyed any of it, she says. “Our society puts down actors and those in the entertainment field. They belittled the profession. Being an artist didn’t bring me any joy.”
The worst came after she got her second divorce and had to go to court to fight for her daughter’s custody. That’s where she begins to relate to Rehana, a single mother in Saad’s script, going through too much, she says. For Rehana, the fight never ends. An assistant professor at a medical college, she keeps her home affairs running through many phone calls – asking the brother to pick up the daughter, the mother to calm down. “She is always so disturbed, angry and agitated,” Badhon says.
Rehana pants heavily while confronting a male professor who molested a student. The student is afraid to speak out, but Rehana can’t let it go. You don’t really need the script to tell you her past – she has been a fighter, unwilling to compromise. The smile must have faded at some point, when she decided it was better to be tough than try to please a patriarchal world. Saad’s script sprinkles doses of patriarchy everywhere, in the exchange of a couple visiting Rehana, and even in the school life of her little girl (the school finds it not a problem that Rehana’s daughter is pinched by a boy, but calls the girl violent for defending herself by biting him).
Watch: Trailer of Rehana Maryam Noor
“It is very uncommon for a man to be able to see society from a woman's perspective. He (Saad) is very connected to his mother and sister. He has seen their struggles. That is why he could portray it so well,” Badhon says.
Saad put the cast through nine months of rehearsals so they could get into the skin of their characters. Afia Jahin Jaima, who played Rehana’s daughter, ate, slept and spent time with Badhon, until they were so connected that the girl even learned her lines from the senior actor.
Badhon learnt to act like Rehana externally – to not be “loud”, blink or gesture too much. The only part in Rehana she couldn’t agree with initially were the final scenes involving the daughter. “The director convinced me eventually. Rehana is agitated and frustrated. You take out your frustration on people you are close to, because you are not an angel or a saint. You are human.”
Internally, Badhon says, she could relate to Rehana. “I know how people can be cruel to their loved ones. I am a single mother and my daughter has been living with me. But when she was six, her father suddenly wanted to take her. I was depressed and frustrated, but I realised I had to fight for myself and my daughter.”
It was not easy. Everyone around her – including her family, friends and even her lawyer – said the father can take the daughter, as that was the norm and even the Sharia law prescribed it, she says. “In Sharia law, a mother could not be the legal guardian of the child. There is a clause that the mother can be one if the father is not capable [of looking after a child]. But this rarely happens. Rare as it may be, I still won the guardianship of my daughter.”
Those were the days she realised how she had always played the role of the ‘good girl and woman, good mother and daughter’, but was still labelled a failure when her marriage failed, she says. “The society and the law were telling me: ‘You are no one. Your uterus was used and now this baby belongs to her father.’ This realisation made me angry. I wondered then, what am I? [There was] no space for me as a human being in this world. I didn’t want to be that person,” Badhon says.
She may be 38, but she calls herself a four-year-old, because that’s how long it has been since she began living for herself, finding her place in the world, no more tuned to the whims of a society that has never been kind to her. “I don’t want my daughter to do what I did. She is 10 now.”
Badhon feels that with Rehana, she can finally try to enjoy her work and life. She has already worked on a third film – Khufiya – in India, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj. She loved working with Vishal and co-actor Tabu, she says. The film is expected to release on Netflix this year.