OSAMA

Rating: 5

In the course of Siddiq Barmak’s OSAMA, an old man dangles a string of heavy and ornate locks in front of the child whom he has forcibly married and asks her to choose one. He jingles them playfully while looking at her with an indulgent smile because for him it is a mark of his favor to let her choose. For the child, it is the lock that will keep her a prisoner in her own room from that day forward. By this point in the film, there is one fact about which neither she nor we can make any mistake. For this child there is no escape. It adds another dimension altogether to that otherwise quaintly archaic notion of a fate worse than death.

The story of OSAMA is one that has no place in the modern world. But then again, set in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, we are being shown a world that existed until recently, but one that is anything but modern. In that land and in that time, live 12-year-old Marina (Marina Golbahari), her mother, and her grandmother, women who have lost the men in their family through the endless wars that were waged in that region for decades. With the Taliban in power, they are non-persons, a point brought home in the film’s opening sequence in which a group of women attempt to protest the restrictions on them that amount to house arrest. But instead of people, there is a sea of blue burkha, the head-to-toe covering that reduces the wearer to an object, robbed of any individuality whatsoever. In danger of starving to death because they are forbidden to work, the family comes up with a desperate plan. They will cut Marina’s hair, dress her in her father’s cut-down clothes, and send her out into the world as a boy who can earn money to save them. There is a frightening intensity to the quiet way that Marina protests with a simple sentence. “If the Taliban find out, they will kill me.” And there is an equally frightening intensity to the way that no one disagrees with her.

Marina’s first day out, walking beside her mother, she can’t enjoy the new freedom. Her eyes dart, her body winces, as she expects the discovery that will doom them all. Marina exhibits the hyperawareness of paranoia, but a paranoia that doesn’t spring from insanity, but rather from a sanity that sees all too clearly that the world has gone mad. That realization, when it hits home, is jarring in the extreme. First-time actress Golbahari gives a performance as powerful as any ever captured on film, coming as it does from her personal experience of life under the Taliban. The sadness, the anger, and the resignation are all evident in a face that has forgotten how to smile if, in fact, it had ever learned how. This is a face stamped with the intelligence of fear, of learning quickly how to survive under the rule of men with guns and no limits to their powers.

The Taliban, as seen through her eyes, are men waving rifles while clinging to the back of speeding pick-up trucks, looking for what they consider to be traitors to Islam. It renders a masjid the refuge a place of worship should be, to become instead a trial by metaphorical fire, as Marina tries to fake her way through the service she’s been forced into without any knowledge of the rituals particular to a boy’s way of worship. And it adds an added dimension to the poignancy of her recurring fantasy of jumping rope, hair unbound, face unveiled in the sunshine. Contrast that with the Taliban stopping a man on a bicycle and verbally abusing him for allowing his wife to ride on the back. Doesn’t he know, they ask, that it will arouse men? The camera focuses on the woman’s feet, wearing sandals and barely peeking out from beneath her chador. One of the mullahs takes his whip, points, and tells her to cover herself.

What Barmak captures with a terrifying purity from first frame to last is the claustrophobia of being trapped not behind walls or even borders, but within the confines of one’s own body in a land where being female has been criminalized seemingly overnight. He contrasts this with a cinematic poetry of pearlized light and careful composition that is like a faded memory. The juxtaposition of inhumanity and beauty is almost unbearable with the poetry extending to his use of sound. There is little in the soundtrack beyond the sparing use of a woman’s mournful song. Instead, there are ominous silences cut by the heightened sound of footsteps echoing in an alleyway, the everyday sounds of scissors cutting, in this case the clothes being altered for Marina, and the ripping of photographs as Marina’s mother destroys family photos, carefully putting the one of her husband at the bottom so that she doesn’t have to see it rent apart.

OSAMA is the first film made entirely in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. It’s also the first film made entirely by an Afghanis. As such, it leaves an indelible mark eviscerating the rhetoric of politics and religion and laying open the human suffering, which is what it all comes down to, and which should never be far from the minds of the rhetoriticians in ivory towers.