With Istikhara, New York, writer/director Yasir Masood uses New York as Isabel Sandoval did in 2019 with Lingua Franca, reframing and recontextualizing the iconography of a familiar city to include stories that have been left out in the city’s cinematic narrative. Masood’s film looks deeper to reveal a quintessentially American story about chasing a dream by using characters of color that have been stereotyped to death and left out of America’s cinematic tradition.
Masood paints an essayistic portrait of Reza (Nabeel Masood), a 20-something Pakistani-American man struggling to become an actor as he works as a bike courier for a food delivery service. Reza is not burdened by this crisis of identity as he struggles to reconcile his Pakistani identity with his American identity, and he isn’t facing pressure to change his dreams because he’s an immigrant. Instead, we follow him for a day as he delivers food, messes around with friends, sees a girl or two, and goes to an audition. As we follow Reza, Yasir Masood creates this beautifully abstract portrait of a city that’s home to these stories, using the daunting architecture to show a city always in frame but always out of reach as we look out at the skyscrapers with Reza on the ground floor of this city trying to make this dream happen.
The first scene in this movie takes place in a breakfast spot, where Reza meets up with Babbu (Faizan Kareem) and Rahul (Harris Ansari), and they debate their courier company cutting wages so they could reinvest that money into safety programs for their riders. Babbu is looking to organize the workers while Rahul isn’t interested, and Reza is trying to keep his head down and focus on acting. These three characters feel like they’ve been friends for years, and we get to see them argue and joke and jostle each other before deciding to pray.
When we see Muslims praying in American movies, it always either feels vaguely threatening, or it feels rigid and strict. Yasir Masood instead chooses to show us the spirituality in the act of prayer. It’s filmed as a montage, in slow motion with piano beats overlayed against the visuals, a radiant sun pouring in from the window as we watch these friends go through the movements, along with a few extras who have joined in. There is a rhythm to the movements, hypnotic and fluid, bathed in the glow from a golden sun. There is another moment of prayer later on, and again, Yasir Masood makes it beautiful and spiritually overwhelming, breaking apart the racism found in the American ecosystem and replacing it with a profound image of community.
Later on in the movie, we see Reza stop by the apartment of Rose (Kelly McCready), the girl he’s been seeing who also happens to be the casting director of a play he has an audition for later that day, and, again, it feels like Yasir Masood is actively breaking apart our mental image of the Muslim man and replacing it with a sensuality that makes us feel human. In a scene with them in bed, we enter at the foot of the bed, with the camera lingering over shots of their bare feet as it moves up to capture their languidly relaxed bodies slightly tangled. When Reza sits up with an open button down revealing a bare chest and smokes a joint, it feels like a shot borrowed from Wong Kar-wai. Smoking on film is one of the most sensual acts that can be performed on camera, when done properly, and Yasir Masood returns us to the Hong Kong of Wong for a moment, reminding us of Tony Leung; except here we have Nabeel Masood become the object of our affection. It feels long overdue that we can watch a beautiful moment of Islamic prayer in a movie, and then follow that up with that character sensually smoking with an open shirt next to a woman in bed.
Levi Wilkinson’s cinematography, combined with Cammeron Neely’s editing and Ross Mayfield’s score, allows Yasir Masood to create this poetic portrait of New York, using montage to root this story within the specificity of a place. The camera might go from rigid architecture to an open blue sky to trains, as Reza’s voiceover, to the tune of a piano beat, speaks. But, sometimes, we are given a montage of images with just the piano, and we begin to gain a sense of Reza’s story painted against New York’s canvas.
Yasir Masood’s New York feels as New York as Spike Lee, and the story being told is political without being drowned in politics. Pakistani identity is rooted in a dense history, rooted in the colonization of India and the Partition of India which created Pakistan, which is the bloodiest moment in the nation’s history, and Yasir Masood creates an atmosphere where characters can speak about these topics without the film stopping itself to explain what these terms mean. By nature of who we are, our existence on this Earth is rooted in a specific history that is carried in our blood regardless of where we live. Yasir Masood is able to tap into the specificities of a Pakistani-American Muslim identity without ever feeling like he is attempting to explain our culture to a broad audience that might not get it. It all feels conversational, which taps into the authenticity of the immigrant experience and carrying your history with you. And right around the corner we have another beautiful montage of this city and the stories being told within its boundaries.
Istikhara, New York is a beautiful movie, filled with radiance and life, exploring a perspective on screen that has been absent from the American film landscape for far too long. There is a need for new images within the American cinematic ecosystem to replace the bigotry and hate that has influenced American movies since 9/11 gave us a tangible enemy to otherize. With Istikhara, New York, Yasir Masood throws one of the first pebbles that will hopefully create the ripples that will lead to a new standard.
