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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A girl named Osama
You might say that Siddiq Barmak was flavor of the month in international film circles -- if it hadn't taken him seven years and an escape from the Taliban to get there. Barmak's film "Osama" got a kind of affirmative-action boost from being the only movie from Afghanistan anybody in the West has ever seen (it's just the 43rd Afghan feature ever), but it's been playing in the United States for six weeks and keeps spreading to more cities. It's now apparent this is one of those little foreign films that won't quit, and if you've seen it you understand why. If you haven't seen it because it sounded too much like spinach cinema, I'm here to tell you not to miss out.
Most American critics haven't known what to make of "Osama," largely because it doesn't fit any predigested categories. Its story, about a little girl whose mother forces her to masquerade as a boy so she can work in the nightmare world of the Taliban regime, is strongly pro-feminist and harshly critical of Islamic fundamentalism. But it's not pro-Western propaganda or an American-style tearjerker. I found it both devastating and beautiful, but it's an elliptical, atmospheric work that spins out its tale of terror with mythological intensity. It's no surprise that Barmak says his favorite directors are people most American filmgoers have never heard of, from Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami to Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the late Georgian genius Tengiz Abuladze.
In between television interviews during a brief New York stopover, the gracious, soft-spoken Barmak talked to me, in melodious, half-fractured English, about his film's title, which might be its most controversial but also most misleading element. (What did he tell U.S. Customs upon arrival at Newark airport? "I'm from Afghanistan and I made an award-winning film called 'Osama'"?) The little girl who serves as his central character (played by the amazing Marina Golbahari) is christened Osama only in desperation, and the name is mentioned only once. "The previous title was 'Rainbow,'" Barmak says with a wince. "There was a special scene that I wrote -- I never put it in the film because I found it very stupid. This little girl, and some other girls, escape by crossing through a very beautiful landscape and passing under a rainbow. It was a big lie.
"We have to follow the reality -- maybe a strong reality. I tried to find another title, and I found it from the film. When the little boys are following the little girl, they are calling out, 'She's a girl, she's a girl!' And the little boy who wants to protect her says, 'He's a boy and his name is Osama!' He thought at the time that this name would create a scare and a fear. So I thought, this is the title. Because my film is about horror. Who was behind all this horror? Osama bin Laden. I'm not on the side of commercializing this name. But I'm thinking there are a lot of symbolic links between my story and this name."
Barmak's own connections to the Russian and Iranian intellectual elite (he was trained at the famous film school of Moscow University, during the latter days of the Soviet Union) might raise questions about his own political leanings, which he does not seem eager to discuss with an American journalist. His film is an unrelentingly bleak experience, but Barmak says he finds hope in Hamid Karzai's struggling Afghan government and its fledgling constitution.
Despite his harrowing depiction of the Taliban and its medieval ideology, he thinks that persecuting its followers -- the poorest and most desperate people in Afghanistan -- is counterproductive. "In my belief, we have to make a compromise, and in some cases we have to forgive each other," Barmak says. "At some point we have to say, all our fathers and grandfathers and their grandfathers were criminals, because they were involved in all these political mistakes. It's not the time to say who is a criminal. It's the time to say, 'OK, let's go and build our country.' For myself, I did not create a tragedy for the sake of tragedy. I wanted to create a tragedy for a new beginning, and new hope."
Flesh-Eating Zombies: Worse Than the Taliban, or About the Same?
Why do I get to write about the No. 1 film in the country in this column? Oh, you know why. Partly because nobody else who writes about movies for Salon wanted to touch Zack Snyder's remake of "Dawn of the Dead" with a 10-foot zombie-killing stick, and partly because, well, we know exactly what you art-geek types like to watch when you're taking a break from those bootleg all-region Tengiz Abuladze DVDs.
Well, anyway. The good news about the new "Dawn of the Dead" is that it's not a devastating parable about nuclear war or terrorism or sexually transmitted disease or the decay of the suburban dream. Don't get me wrong; we went through all that in the '80s with Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and John Carpenter and Clive Barker and zombie-meister George A. Romero himself, and it was great. Every movie where somebody got their face eaten off or grew a new sex organ or wound up as a piece of pepperoni on Freddy Krueger's hellish slice of pizza was an allegory for whatever it was we currently hated about Reagan's America, man.
But with Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" and last year's equally enjoyable (and equally pointless) remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," horror movies seem to be experiencing a badly needed back-to-basics movement. Even Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" -- although I didn't think it was as great as the entire rest of the world did -- exhibited a low-budget pretentiousness that belonged to the depresso British '70s rather than the espresso American '80s.
No, this is a movie without deeper meanings, and I want you to feel OK about that. (Profound significance will return to the horror genre; we just needed a break from all that.) This is an old-fashioned gross-out movie, in which Sarah Polley wakes up at dawn to discover that her beloved daughter has become a ravening, flesh-eating zombie. Her husband soon follows suit, and our heroine goes out the bathroom window without a single look back. She and a handful of other still-human survivors (hardass cop Ving Rhames, troubled playa Mekhi Phifer, lovable loser Jake Weber, sinister redneck Michael Kelley, etc.) end up in a shopping mall encircled by the undead, just as in Romero's deathless (ha!) 1978 original. But back then that was a grand joke: zombies at the mall. Today, where the hell else would you go? The mall is pretty much all there is.
So there they are, growing ever more paranoid as they suck down the leftover mochaccino slush at Starbucks and watch each other for signs of impending zombiehood. How did this happen? Is the world at an end? Can they bust out successfully with a couple of "Road Warrior"-style souped-up mall shuttles? Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn know better than to take any of these questions seriously; in Romero's grand tradition, nothing is ever explained. No, I take that back. It's just that they understand what questions are really important and dare to broach medical-slash-metaphysical puzzles never considered before. What happens when a pregnant woman who has become a zombie gives birth? See this and, at last, you will know.
