Mark Reviews Movies: THE PERFECT CANDIDATE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021

With The Perfect Candidate, co-writer/director Haifaa Al Mansour examines the social progress and need for continued reform in her homeland of Saudi Arabia. It opens, for example, with our protagonist, a woman and a doctor, driving—a significant change to the country's laws, which only came about in 2018 (around the time Mansour was filming this movie). The rest of the experiences of Dr. Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) show just how much further things for women in Saudi Arabia can progress.

The story follows Maryam as she campaigns for a seat on her town's council. The road to the clinic where she works is unpaved and recently flooded because of a broken water line, and the current council has no apparent interest in doing anything to fix the problems.

Maryam, who dreams of working in a city hospital, more or less becomes a candidate by accident. Her travel permit has expired, and as a woman, she cannot legally update it without her guardian. That would be her father Abdulaziz (Khalid Abdulraheem), who is currently on a concert tour with his band. After getting her foot in the door with a government official by faking interest in the council seat, Maryam decides to submit her application anyway, if only to get the road fixed.

Mansour and co-screenwriter Brad Niemann's narrative is essentially split in two, between Maryam's grassroots campaign—with some help from her skeptical sisters Selma (Dhay) and Sara (Nora Al Awad)—and the father's tour, which eventually comes under threat from militant conservatives. The former thread is, of course, the more enlightening one, as Maryam is making her case to women who don't vote (because they either don't believe in it or simply go along with their husbands) and men who reject her candidacy's legitimacy, simply because she is a woman (A stubborn patient represents that mindset and, quite touchingly, its potential to change).

The point here is fairly clear: For all the progress that Maryam's political freedoms and new rights represent, there are still multitudinous governmental, social, and cultural barricades for women in Saudi Arabia. It's a simple concept, albeit one that's dramatized convincingly by way of Maryam's awakening to the deeper issues her candidacy represents. The Perfect Candidate, though, becomes a bit too distracted by Abdulaziz's story and the broad ideas of Maryam's campaign to dig into those deeper issues.

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