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Siddiq Barmak's new film
Osama is rendered
in the broad strokes of a parable. Like the films of Abbas Kiarostami
and Bahman Ghobadi, Barmak uses a story about children to tell us about
an entire culture and to emphasize the restrictions on the lives of his
characters, the fact that the difficulties they face are not of their
own making. Osama,
however, lacks some of the marvelous subtlety of recent Iranian cinema.
The film is a response to a crisis and as such, it wears its message on
its sleeve. At first glance, this seems to diminish its emotional impact.
Set in
Kabul in the mid-1990s when the Taleban was consolidating its power over
the Afghan capital, the film opens with a mother and daughter caught up
by accident in a street protest of women who have been denied the right
to work by the new regime. The Taleban arrive in their hallmark Toyota
pickups to break up the protest with water cannons, and the images of
hundreds of identical burqua-clad figures fleeing and falling in the muddy
street are shot in harrowing slow motion. Women are trampled and herded
into chicken coops. The scene feels weighed down by the symbolism it is
meant to contain, though it is difficult to tell whether this burden will
lighten or increase over time, as the reality of the setting becomes less
immediate, raw and painful for future viewers.
Other incidents
follow which have this same unnerving allegorical sense: after the hospital
where her mother works is closed, the film's young heroine (whose real
name we never learn) is sent out to find employment, disguised as a boy.
As the girl's hair is cut against her will, her grandmother tells a story
about a boy who was changed into a girl by walking under a rainbow. When
her head is shorn, the girl plants her severed braid in a pot of earth,
as though it were a flower. These details feel incongruous, too precious
for their context. As she works in the shop of a friend of her martyred
father, she draws a stick figure in a skirt with long hair and skirt on
the condensation on the window, and the store owner catches her skipping
rope in the back store room. This is a child whose childhood is being
stolen from her, and it is writ large in these moments.
As the
story develops, however, the fairy-tale simplicity begins to work to the
film's advantage. For one thing, the up-close focus and the measured pacing
of the cinematography force the viewer to experience the ordinariness
of life under the Taleban. What we find is not so much the banality of
their form of evil as its minutiae, the fact that it was the work of people
who looked their victims in the face and still prosecuted an agenda that
denied their humanity. The Taleban were maniacally concerned with details
as small as a woman's bared ankles. Remarkably, both their cruelty and
their morality come across. The film is also concerned with the boundaries
placed on physical space, the way that human beings hem themselves in
or are confined by others, and it takes time over the business of entering
and leaving rooms, arrivals and departures. It shows the horror at ground
level, and as such it is valuable especially to audiences far away from
Afghanistan for whom the country has itself become an evolving symbol
but remains a virtual unknown in its actuality.
The world
we are shown has had simplified meaning imposed on it; the teachings that
underpin the Taleban’s version of Islam allow for no variation in behavior,
dress, gender-roles or religious practice. Women must all look alike,
and so must men. This is a rigidly ordered society and heterogeneity is
the ultimate threat to it. Hence, when the girl is sent to a school for
boys, she finds herself required to dress, play, study – and, finally,
bathe – in sync with the others. It is the fact that she stands out that
causes her problems, and she gets her moniker when her one friend, a street
orphan named Eschandi, tries to protect her by giving her the name of
the sainted Osama bin Laden. It is a vain attempt to make her the part
of something, the same as the others. Finally, the symbolism adds to the
almost unbearable pathos of the ending. The story moves towards what can
only be described as a diabolical inversion of a standard romantic ending.
Osama is an important film for a number of reasons,
not least because it is the first film to be made in Afghanistan in the
post-Taleban era. It is an attempt to grapple with the past, with the
effects of zealotry, and it doesn’t turn away from the final implications
of a philosophy that attempts to control absolutely the lives of women
and girls. It is an indictment of the human tendency to judge based on
preordained categories. It demands instead that we engage with what is
different about each person, whether they are Taleban mullahs or young
girls, and that we face how that uniqueness is destroyed.
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OTR Category - March, 2004