With the fine, slightly socially critical drama The Green Bike, Haifaa Al Mansour first came out as a Saudi Arabian woman to make a feature film. When she was going to record outdoor scenes, because of her gender, she had to direct from inside a van. However, she did so well that the movie about a little girl's struggle to reach her dream, to get the title's two-wheeler, got international wings.

Nowadays, the acclaimed filmmaker lives in the US where she used to direct less-talked-about things such as the biopic about Frankenstein's mother, Mary Shelley, but recently she returned to the Kingdom to tell this story of the young doctor Sara who is struggling hard at a local hospital. with scarce resources. She really wants to go from there, to the big city Riyadh's expensive hospital, but via a random detour, and thanks to a well-developed social pathos, she instead stands in the local election. Which gives shock waves in the small village where women do best to stay on the carpet.

A woman's choice gives a unique insight into a society that we do not see much of here at home, except for the news then, where it is mostly about state-sanctioned murders of dissent or Swedish arms exports.

Haifaa Al Mansour instead gives us traces of the recent (relative) unlocking of the Orthodox system. And that already in the first scene where Sara drives her own car, a scene that would not say much in a movie with another country code, but here it becomes a metaphor for success (it was only 2018 that women were allowed to drive a car on your own). It is also talked about that cinemas were opened in the country and that live music was again allowed.
Later in the movie, Sara also changes her face-covering niqab to a hijab.

But all the other controlling rules and laws remain. One of these many absurdities is that women, just like children, need a guardian, a man person who controls and controls their lives and everyday lives. The handmaid's speech in this context seems almost like a documentary.

It is still a surprisingly gentle picture of the homeland that Haifaa Al Mansour paints. The obstacles are many but they will be overcome, the filmmaker seems to mean, and the patriarchal resistance that her protagonist encounters is no worse than that she can rouse the men, and at least some of them change their perceptions of women's abilities. Which makes a non-initiate surprised to scratch his head. If it's not worse than that, is it just driving? Yes, it is a bit like the tyrant Tengil in the Brothers lion heart would still turn out to be like children.

So it is not the Saudi Arabia of the whipping or executions that we see here. The great social injustices shine with their absence, but so is A woman's choice told from a privileged middle-class perspective. Sara, her sisters and her laid-back musician dad have done well and are living a connected, rich and free life at least in the home. The basically moody mood probably makes the film less controversial in the eyes of the power and therefore possible to market even at home - and thus can be part of the liberalization process of which it tells itself.

Although it is easy to like Haifaa Al Manosur's film for the surprisingly humorous tone, for its important matter, it is at the same time an easy-to-read thing that unfortunately speaks out all its subtitles in words, which are a little too tame and predictable to qualify as a truly engaging cinematic experience.