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It's not exactly the sort of movie to put a smile on your face, but the most interesting and, in the fullest sense of the word, enlightening film you're likely to experience this week originates somewhere a long, long way from Hollywood. The film is called Kandahar and it hails from Afghanistan-by-way-of-Iran. Even if this weren't such a lousy week for Hollywood, Kandahar would still probably be the hottest ticket in town, but consider the alternatives. The other notable openings this week are a big budget remake of the 1975 sci-fi curiosity Rollerball and Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest shoot-em-up, Collateral Damage. The studio decided to screen the former too late for us to review, so use your own best judgment as to what that means. As for the latter flick, we went on record last week with the semi-serious suggestion that Collateral Damage be boycotted because of its star's crimes against humanity, or at least crimes against the DVD-consuming portion of humanity: Arnold's greedy and unprecedented request of a sizable fee for his participation in a recently recorded DVD audio supplement may very well snowball into a copycat phenomenon, the result being a downsizing of special features on DVDs, maybe even a rising of prices.
But enough about Arnold. Kandahar is the most buzzed-about film of the moment, and certainly the timeliest -- a haunting and exquisitely visualized portrait of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Kandahar was shot about a year ago, just before the fecal matter really hit the fan, and the film rings not only with passion and poetry, but with something very much like prophecy. It's impossible to ignore the shiver running up the spine when one of the film's male characters matter-of-factly declares to a much-abused, young Afghan woman, "One day the world will see your troubles and will come to your aid." And this is months and months before 9-11, before America's actions in Afghanistan and everything that's come since.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the director of Kandahar, is one of the most respected and innovative filmmakers in Iran, a country whose cinema is often as sublime as its politics are dubious. Makhmalbaf's movies are rarely simple affairs and are certainly never as uncomplicated as they might initially appear. Even the most minimal and seemingly straightforward of his narratives are frequently layered with tantalizing moral and metaphysical implications (something Makhmalbaf has very much in common with Iran's other preeminent filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami). At the same time, many of Makhmalbaf's recent films, such as Gabbeh and The Silence, have edged closer to a somewhat mystical, almost purely visual realm where narrative has given way to the poetic power of the images themselves. Kandahar combines both strains; some of its images are as extraordinary as anything you'll see up on a movie screen, but the film has a lot more on its mind than just pretty pictures.
As with so many other movies by Makhmalbaf and other Iranian filmmakers, Kandahar builds off the old Italian Neo-realist game plan of maximizing authenticity by eschewing professional actors and, instead, using real people to play versions of themselves. The film's narrative is inspired by the real-life situation of Nelofer Pazira, a Afghan-Canadian journalist who dreamed of returning to her homeland to come to the aid of a childhood friend made dangerously despondent by the Taliban's atrocities and brutal oppression of women. Pazira contacted Makhmalbaf, whose work she had admired for years, thinking he could somehow aid her in her objective. Makhmalbaf wasn't able to actually get Pazira into Afghanistan to reunite her with her friend, but he did turn her dream into one hell of a movie.
In Kandahar, Nelofer (redubbed Nafas, and essentially playing herself) makes good on her desire to travel back to the land of her birth (actually a remote section of Iran subbing for Afghanistan) to seek out her suicidal friend (reinvented here as her sister). The movie is structured as a series of loosely connected episodes, some apparently made up on the spot, giving Kandahar a feel not unlike that of an oddly open-ended sort of road movie or, as Makhmalbaf calls it, a "travel guide." Nafas dons a burka (a shapeless garment proscribed by strict Islamic law that covers a woman from head to toe) and begins her journey to the Taliban city of Kandahar, traveling incognito and enlisting the services of a series of guides along the way, since women are not allowed to travel alone.
What Nafas sees and what happens to her on the road to Kandahar is the substance of the movie, and is often so exceedingly strange that one doesn't quite know whether to laugh or to curl up into a fetal ball. An image of scores of prosthetic limbs floating down from the sky on parachutes is so perfectly surreal it would have made Man Ray's jaw drop (that the sequence was not manufactured, but simply documented, makes the spectacle even more astonishing). Elsewhere, a man with no hands attempts to hitchhike, and a Taliban doctor secretly removes the fake beard he wears to disguise the fact he's unable to grow a real one. In one of Kandahar's most mysterious and lyrical sequences, an all-female wedding party -- a flowing sea of faceless, multicolored burkas -- emerges out of nowhere in the middle of the desert, chanting songs that sound more like mournful cries for help than joyous melodies of celebration.
As with so much in the Islamic world, there are things here that are profoundly beautiful as well as much that is profoundly scary. Paranoia is rampant; adult males humiliating and physically abusing women and little girls is a routine occurrence. In perhaps the movie's single most terrifying moment, we're taken inside one of those infamous Islamic religious schools, where hundreds of young boys are bobbing their heads up and down in a frenzy of hive-like activity, as they go about the no-nonsense business of reciting the Koran. A supervising adult periodically interrupts the desperate, rat-a-tat rhythms of the youngsters' prayers to ask them rhetorical questions about the tenets of their faith. "A saber is a weapon that executes God's orders," declares one well-informed child, who then goes on to happily detail the virtues of severing the heads and hands of infidels. His words are part of a well-rehearsed litany that all the children are expected to memorize and to follow.
The boy, no more than 10 years old, then puts down his Koran and picks up a nasty-looking rifle, raising it in the air as he finishes his recitation, declaring at the top of his little lungs that it is no sin to take the life of any non-Muslim because, in essence, they are already "dead."
Forget your Ted Bundys and Hannibal Lecters. This little boy's adamant refusal to grant "living" or "human" status to virtually anyone he pleases is not only eerily similar to the psychological profile of a serial killer, it's a far more disturbing -- because the boy's mindset is only a reflection of the official position of the much larger group to which he belongs. What this one moment in Kandahar all too clearly implies is the supremely ugly notion of a whole legion of serial killers and (uglier still) budding serial killers. These are individuals whose concepts of themselves and of reality have been so profoundly distorted they now possess an appalling eagerness to effortlessly dehumanize anyone unlike themselves. You cannot kill what is already dead; they smile, looking right through us. Kandahar's crystal clear connection between the serial killer mentality and the killing machine of fundamentalist Islam might be the scariest thing you'll see on a movie screen all year.
The differences between the sort of Islamic politics practiced in the Taliban's Afghanistan and Makhmalbaf's Iran may seem minuscule to some, but just the fact that Kandahar was allowed to be made demonstrates the existence of more than a few major differences, and perhaps even a glimmer or two of hope. And lest you get the impression that Kandahar is a relentlessly bleak proposition, there is hope in it as well. "If walls are high, the sky is higher still," is the film's eloquent message to a group of girls bound for Afghanistan, where there are no schools for women. And then a woman raises her veil to look at the sun -- an image that opens and closes the film -- and for a brief, glorious, moment, she reveals herself to the world.
