No, no, it's not about that Osama.
The title is a false name given to the title character, an Afghan girl (Marina Golbahari) on the cusp of womanhood who poses as a boy so that she can find work in the Taliban's fanatical, male-dominated society. (This is a familiar narrative in Islamic cinema.) The movie's opening puts us in the position of a privileged, powerful male spectator (later revealed to be a visiting journalist). A young, male street urchin named Espandi (Arif Herati) approaches Barmak's first-person camera offering to bless the spectator with incense in exchange for a small fee. In the background, a group of Afghan women gathers to protest their unemployment.
"We are not political," they chant. "We are hungry. Give us work."
For this incredible display of physical courage, the women are rewarded with physical assault by Taliban men, who descend upon them, trampling and beating them and spraying them with hoses. The sequence reaches an emotional peak with shots of men forcing women into cages and padlocking them to prevent escape?a reduction of women to the level of unruly animals, and a metaphor for their lives under the Taliban.
The girl's widowed mother (Zubaida Sahar) is a nurse; we see her practicing medicine on the sly, sneaking into a hospital to treat people and then, when confronted by a Taliban male, turning away and feigning ignorance and docility?the Taliban Afghan equivalent of a Stepin Fetchit routine. Suffering from poverty and weak from hunger, the girl's mother hits on a desperate scheme: She will cut her daughter's hair, put her in altered clothes belonging to her dead husband and put her to work with a kindly local grocer. ("This boy is my daughter," she tells the grocer?a sentence so simple it stings.)
One day, the girl is taken away from the grocer by religious police and brought to a mosque, where her unfamiliarity with the rituals of public male prayer raises doubts about her manliness. Soon after, she is enrolled in a religious school that doubles as a military training center for the Taliban?a place where boys are taught rituals of manhood, including religious and combat training and the proper way to wash one's genitals. (During the latter ceremony, Osama escapes being exposed because her chest is not developed and because everyone?including the old man teaching the class and the boys under his instruction?wears sheets to protect their modesty. This is one of the few scenes in Osama that strains credulity, particularly when the old man instructs the heroine to get undressed and bathe; Barmak fudges the moment by cutting back to the old man watching, then returning the girl already submerged in a tub of hot water.)
Osama gets her name from a classmate, the street urchin seen in the film's opening, who protects her from a group of marauding boys who question her masculinity by declaring that her name is Osama. The name is symbolically right on a couple of levels. First, it's associated with feared terrorist Osama bin Laden, figurehead of the Taliban's sugar daddies, Al Qaeda; second, it's a common name that can be applied to both male and female children.
The name suggests a degree of sexual maneuvering room that does not really exist. There are only three kinds of Afghans in this world: men, boys and nonpersons. The nonpersons are women and girls, forced by fundamentalist doctrine to forgo learning, earning a living and otherwise bettering themselves, to cover themselves from head to toe, never leaving the house without a male relative as escort, and to look away when addressed by a man not related to them by blood. Insubordination is punishable by physical abuse; blasphemy and adultery merit the death penalty. This seems an absurdist nightmare world?the kind of place Rod Serling might have created to make political points on The Twilight Zone while escaping a censor's scissors?but from the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 until the American invasion of 2001, it was real. And women suffered.
Barmak avoids explicit political statements in his dialogue?the few lines that qualify are obliquely comic, the kind of sentiments that might be uttered by characters in fiction by Kafka or Joseph Heller. But this is still an intensely political film. It asks world audiences to consider the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism not as anecdotal fodder for talk show arguments, but in human terms. This is not a film that tells you something you already knew; it's a movie that helps you understand, on a deep level, something you only thought you knew. It presents sexism as a primal form of cruelty devised by one group of people in order to subjugate another. (Fittingly, Osama starts with a printed quote from Nelson Mandela.)
Barmak's filmmaking strategy is distinctive to the point of being self-conscious, but because Osama is conceived as equal parts human drama and nightmarish fairy tale, it works. There are two main stylistic signatures. The first half of the film often puts us in the position of a powerful spectator?usually a Taliban male looking at the women, who are rarely permitted to look back, even when engaged in conversation. This technique is twinned with another one that's equally unsettling: Starting with the opening protest, which our heroine escapes by hiding behind a door, and continuing throughout the film, we are made to look at Osama while she appears to look at us.
This young, untrained actress' face is startlingly focused and intense. Intelligently lit by cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafori, it has an iconic beauty; with her dark eyes, short haircut and strong jaw, Golbahari faintly resembles Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, the movie that's rightly credited with perfecting the close-up as we know it. Her stare is searing?and yet, ironically, in the context of this movie it has no power whatsoever. The eye contact between Osama and the audience should spur thoughts about the connection between the male gaze and the exercise of power?a topic not just of Laura Mulvey's writing on film theory, but of the entire careers of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and Brian De Palma.
Barmak complements his lead actress' coiled intensity with carefully chosen, oft-repeated images and sounds. We hear certain noises over and over?the scraping of a spoon stirring a metal soup pot, the grinding of metal gears, the wailing of women who are either grieving or feigning grief to deceive thickheaded, bullying men. The movie is filled with explicit symbols of imprisonment?jailhouse bars, padlocks, chains?as well as compositions that are carved up by vertical, out-of-focus foreground objects to communicate the idea of imprisonment. (Early in the film, we see the heroine through a scrim of hanging bead strings, fuzzed out-of-focus to suggest prison bars.) The ending is haunting, and not at all happy. It feels right.
The sheer concentration on display in Osama is impressive?so impressive that even veteran filmmakers should feel a bit ashamed that their own movies are not thought out with the same care. Barmak?who conceived the film in the spring of 2002 and shot during four months of that same year with a cast of nonprofessionals?was clearly concerned, first and foremost, with getting the film done. There are a few shots and moments that seem rushed and imprecise. Some of the dialogue sounds dubbed, some of the handheld camerawork is wilder than Hollywood would allow and a few of the most emotionally transcendent moments in the film's first half occur in shots where the focus is a bit soft. But these technical flaws don't matter, any more than the flaws of Open City mattered. What matters is honesty, concentration and vision; Osama has all three.
Barmak's amazing personal story, which I was privileged to hear after a screening last week, is worth noting here, because it makes most American filmmakers' hard luck tales sound tame. Born and raised in Afghanistan, he survived the Soviet invasion and studied film in Moscow. He returned to Afghanistan in the 1990s and lived there until the Taliban took over in 1996; the government confiscated the five short films and one feature he'd made up to that point. Barmak fled to Pakistan until the American invasion, then returned and came up with the idea for Osama after hearing the true story of an Afghan girl who posed as a boy to find work. He persevered and got the film made, winning countless honors, including a Golden Globe as best foreign language film and status as Afghanistan's official entry at this year's Oscars. The movie is now entering North American theaters as one of the few recent foreign language films with a steamroller of hype that actually deserves the attention it's getting.
Osama is the first feature film completed by an Afghan filmmaker since the rise of the Taliban. After the screening, an audience member asked the filmmaker how many features had been made in Afghanistan. "We have 42 films," he said. Then, stealing a glance at the screen that just showed Osama, he added, "Now, 43."