Dir: Siddiq Barmak. Starring: Marina Golbahari, Mohamad Nader Khajeh, Zobeydeh Sahar, Mohamad Araf Harat, Zubaida Sahar.
Let me say, I was skeptical going into this film. Neo-realism, on the whole doesn’t really do it for me. Directed by anything but a master, it’s usually terribly heavy handed, and in substituting an emotional argument for a logical one, usually pretty banal on whatever social problem the director happens to be beating the drum about. Osama, sadly, was exactly what I thought it would be. The film’s success in the U.S and subsequent Golden Globe win says more about what people would like to hear, rather than what they should.
Osama is the pseudonym of a nameless Afghan girl, forced to adopt the guise of a boy to save her family from starvation. Working in a tiny shop, she spends most of her time cowering from menacing Taliban troops, but when they decide to re-educate the town’s male children, her disguise risks being exposed. What follows is grindingly slow and largely redundant. You see, this ain’t exactly The Crying Game: Osama makes a convincing boy like Gwyneth Paltrow makes a convincing actress. Putting herself in dangerous situations and acting stupidly time and time again, changes the question from whether she will be caught, to when, and that doesn’t make for good cinema.
First-feature Director Siddiq Barmak is obviously cribbing from the very famous Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, but his work possesses none of the subtlety and modulation of the other. Rather, we see a very simplistic story, told very
Worse than this, though, is the film’s unambiguous portrayal of everything. As women, Osama and her family come across – fairly – as desperate and disempowered, but unfairly, as little else. The Taliban, kohl – literally – to the eyeballs and twirling moustaches look like extras from an Arabian Nights mini-series. This unremitting evil might be accurate – Barmak would know better than me – but cinematically, it’s just way too convenient for Westerners. Watching this film, audiences are invited to sit back with a self-satisfied nod, and say “We did the right thing.”
Fixing the film temporally has blinded it. What about a movie set in the Afghanistan of today? The ruined hospitals and derelict buildings that haunt every frame haven’t sprung back up like mushrooms after rain, though the heroin production certainly has. As record of a terrible time of oppression, I guess Osama is okay, but hidden behind every frame is the implication that this has all stopped, and it hasn’t. A, magnified, uber-personal view of a situation rife with politics and power is, I would argue, immoral. You just can’t ignore these questions, and – yes emotion is necessary – but it is no substitute. Osama is exactly what most Westerners want to think about the third world in general, and Afghanistan in particular. For that alone, it’s a problematic film. Coupled with laboured directing, and a dog of a story, this movie just doesn’t cut the mustard.
(That said, anybody who loved Samsara or Spring Time in a Small Town will probably get a kick out of this, you slackers.)
D
Patrick Garson.
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