Azmeri Haque Badhon plays a professor of medicine who teeters between fierce feminism and personal obsession in Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s second feature, the first Bangladeshi film in Cannes’ offici…
The protagonist’s full name is in the film’s title — Dr. Rehana Maryam Noor — but its inherent dignity doesn’t hit home until the last shot. Up to then, this young assistant professor of medicine, a widow with a daughter in first grade, is simply the unbending teacher out of hell, Rehana. For starters, she flexes her moral muscle by expelling a med student for scribbling notes on the back of a ruler during an exam.
The second feature from writer-director Abdullah Mohammad Saad is not only a chilling portrait of the psyche of an unbalanced woman, played with extraordinary intensity by newcomer Azmeri Haque Badhon. It is equally a bow of admiration to a woman who sticks to her guns and refuses to look the other way, like everyone else, in a messy case of sexual assault.