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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