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A girl survives as a boy in Kabul

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Mar 12, 2004, Page 20

One of the effects of the 911 attacks was to wake up the distracted Western public to the horror of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Now, with the Taliban out of power, Osama, the first film produced in Afghanistan since they took over in 1996, arrives to nudge us back into a state of alertness, and also, as remnants of the ousted regime continue to menace that nation's peace and stability, to trouble our sleep and our consciences as well.

Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, an Afghan filmmaker trained in Moscow in the 1980s and clearly influenced by the Iranian humanist cinema of the 1990s, Osama begins with an apt epigraph from Nelson Mandela: "I can forgive, but I cannot forget."

Barmak is unsparing in his anatomy of the Taliban's cruelty, especially as it was directed against women, but there is very little feeling of vengefulness or hatred in the film, which makes it all the more devastating in the end.

The opening scenes, a kind of trompe l'oeil documentary within the movie whose meaning becomes clear only much later, capture the violent suppression of a women's-rights demonstration in the sandy, war-blasted streets of Kabul. A scared young girl (Marina Golbahari) watches from a doorway as Taliban soldiers, using water hoses, live ammunition and grenade launchers, scatter a crowd of women in blue and ocher burkhas.

Osama begins with a quote from Nelson Mandela, ``I can forgive, but I cannot forget,'' and deals with the excesses of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, primarily from the perspective of a girl called Osama. PHOTOS COURTESY OF CROWN FILMS

This is only the most brutal and public manifestation of the pervasive terror under which women in Kabul must live. The hospital where the girl's mother works is raided, and the mother (Zubaida Sahar) is saved from arrest only when a man whose father is in her care says he is her husband. There is an almost absurd sadism to the Taliban's regulations of women's behavior. Even when a household includes no men -- hardly uncommon after so many years of war -- the women still may not be seen in public or earn a living. An uncovered foot or an unwelcome word can lead to harassment, or even severe

punishment.

Despite all this injustice, the girl's kindly grandmother insists that the sufferings of men and women are equal because the sexes themselves are equal. This leads her to conclude that they may also be interchangeable, and so her granddaughter, with a short haircut and a dark skullcap, is sent out to work for a sympathetic shopkeeper. (She is later given the name Osama by a young beggar who knows the secret of her identity.) A similar masquerade was at the heart of Majid Majidi's film Baran, about an Afghan refugee in Tehran who disguised herself as a boy to work at a construction site.

Film Notes: Osama Directed by: Siddiq Barmak Starring: Marina Golbahari (Osama), Arif Herati (Espandi), Zubaida Sahar (Mother), Khwaja Nader (Mullah) and Hamida Refah (Grandmother) Running time: 82 minutes Taiwan Release: Today Language: Farsi, with Chinese and English subtitles

Like Majidi, Barmak has a gently poetic visual sense: after her metamorphosis, one of the girl's severed braids is planted in a flower pot and watered by an intravenous drip her mother rescued from the shut-down hospital. He is also able to find moments of tenderness and humor in his bleak story. One sequence that stands out is a lesson in intimate hygiene taught to madrasa students by an elderly mullah -- a glimpse at the radical Islamist approach to sex education.

Barmak's patron was the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose Kandahar is set in Taliban-era Afghanistan and whose daughter Samira's At Five O'Clock in the Afternoon takes place in Kabul after the American-led rout of the Taliban. Some of the surrealist touches in Osama -- gorgeous, haunting images that call for an adjective like Makhmalbafian -- may be a result of this association, and the orange glow that suffuses the landscape in all three movies may owe something to the fact that they share the gifted cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri. This is not to take anything away from Barmak, who had the self-confidence to embark on this project with donated equipment, a tiny budget and a cast of nonprofessionals recruited from the streets of Kabul.

The mere existence of the movie, which received the Camera d'Or special mention for best first feature in Cannes last year and the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month, would be impressive enough. But the movie's power and coherence are such that you forget completely about the hard circumstances of its making, which is nothing short of astonishing.

There is not much overt or explicit violence in Osama, which opens today in Taiwan, but an unshakable dread shadows the bright alleyways of Kabul and seeps through the heavy wooden doors of the houses. Like The Pianist, Roman Polanski's tour of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Osama is a meticulous and beautifully made inquiry into the ways that ideological evil can infect, and ultimately destroy, the intimacies and small pleasures of daily life.

Osama has no special resiliency or survival skills; her face is, at every moment, a study in suppressed panic and worried passivity. Her unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.
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