A sequence at the very start of Happy Birthday sets up the economic disparity pivotal to the film. A rich young girl, Nelly, talks about making wishes every birthday and how they turn out real for her, year after year. Her grandmother’s 8-year-old child maid and her best friend and companion, Toha, doesn’t even know what a wish is. “Is it something like a prayer?” she asks, adding, “I pray all the time but nothing happens.” Even God, if there is one, appears to favour the haves rather than the have-nots.
Egyptian-American filmmaker Sarah Goher’s debut feature, about a child’s brush with the harsh reality of class divides and discriminations, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year where it won three major awards—Best International Narrative Feature, the Nora Ephron Award (for female filmmakers competing in the festival) and Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature. It is also the Egyptian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the upcoming Oscars.
The film starts off with Nelly wanting a party to ring in her ninth birthday but her mother Laila, with a divorce and move of home looming large, doesn’t feel she’d be able to pull it off. Toha, who’s never had a birthday, wants to make it happen for Nelly. All she wants in return is to be able to blow a candle and make a wish. But the class divide ensures that she’d be denied even this little harmless desire and sent back to her fishing village rather than mix with the upper class children. A scenario that’d hit home for us in India as well, riddled as it is with similar issues.
Happy Birthday is told from the perspective of Toha. It’s through her eyes that we see the seeming kindness of her employers turn into benign cruelty even as she realises that the nascent inequities will always come in the way of any attempts to rise above her circumstances. The assumption that she’d have lice in her hair, being disallowed from trying out clothes in an expensive store, wondering what the parents of the upper class kids will say if she is allowed to stay for the party and eventually being disallowed entry in the very housing complex where she has been working—the family uses her merely as an object of utility while she wants to stay with them forever and become part of the family. Clearly then mobility is less achieved than dreamt.
The childhood innocence—the friendship between Toha and Nelly—is posited as a redemptive force that helps build the essential human connection but gets throttled by social hierarchies. The arc of the film then is bleak and despairing and at the core of its politics is the awful issue of child labour. It’s distressing indeed to see Toha do all the adult work, from helping the grandmother with her insulin injections to changing the gas cylinder.
The filmmaker has dedicated the film to Sahar, the kid of her age who used to work in her grandmother’s house in Cairo. It is she who inspired the story and the development of Toha’s character. “Everyone dealt with her presence as if there was nothing unusual. If anything, my grandmother was praised for taking her in and sparing her a worse reality of harsh labor and godknowswhat… But the closer I got to Sahar, the more I could sense the big feelings hiding inside her little body that no one seemed to notice; her complicated sense of identity hanging in limbo between two very different and unforgiving worlds,” writes Goher.
The film is a straight and simple and often predictable narrative that points a finger at the audience, plays with its emotions, specially the guilt of the privileged, at times cloyingly so. The sentimentality, however, gets balanced out by Goher’s empathetic touch and the incredible presence and performance of Doha Ramadan in the lead role of Toha. The authenticity of her portrayal stems, perhaps, from the fact that her own life is no different from that of her character’s. Her mother works as a maid in the houses in suburban Cairo and is also a street vendor of herbs. Doha herself had never acted professionally and, like Toha, is also unlettered. So, the filmmaker set up an academic and artistic programme for her during and after the shooting of the film.
Doha shares a warm equation not just with her young onscreen friends Nelly (Khadija) and the toktok driver Fateh (Fares) and Hanan Motawie who plays her mother Nadia. But most lovely is the brief moment of bonding with the Egyptian superstar Nelly Karim who plays her employer Laila as they go about planning the birthday.
Some other moments stand out, like Toha wondering when she was born or fighting and making up with the younger sister over a new frock. The poignancy of the situations comes from Doha who, quite evidently, is to the camera born; more so for not being aware of it.