Osama: Brilliant disguise

Osama

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Editor's note: The long-delayed Las Vegas opening of Osama, originally scheduled for Friday, was canceled because the film was released on DVD/video this week.

The last 100 years have seen fewer than 40 films made in Afghanistan, a country where war, economic hardship and cultural oppression are a way of life. Osama is the first film to be made since the recent overthrow of the Taliban, made possible by donations from Iran's Ministry of Culture and the Makhmalbaf Film House--which also loaned the sublime cinematographer, Kandahar's Ebrahim Ghafuri. As a result, first-time director Siddiq Barmaq was able to produce 82 minutes of film more lyrical, and more moving, than anything to come out of Hollywood in a very long time.

Filmed entirely in Kabul using untrained actors, Osama is the wrenching story of a 12-year-old girl (Marina Golbahari) forced to pose as a boy when her mother (Zubaida Sahar), a nurse, loses her job at a hospital closed down by the Taliban. With no men left in the family (the mother's brother and husband have both been killed in different wars), and with women prohibited from working without a "legal companion," drastic measures are required to avoid starvation. Shorn of her hair and in constant terror of discovery, the child is dispatched to work for a sympathetic grocer; but when she's abducted by a roving band of Taliban, on the hunt for young boys to "train" in their religious schools, the girl soon discovers her terrors are only beginning.

The profound and sadistic oppression of women by Islamic fundamentalism has so far been documented mostly by Iranian filmmakers. Both Jafar Panahi's The Circle and Marziyeh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman are fascinating glimpses of lives lived, literally, under wraps. And in the stunning Kandahar, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Meshkini's husband) draws a society poisoned by ideology and destroyed by ignorance. Much simpler than any of these, Osama's horror lies in its ability to convey the anxiety of constant watchfulness with images of ingenious modesty and stillness: A sinister, black-robed figure waiting silently at the end of a street, or a motionless crowd encircling a partially buried female journalist who's been sentenced to death by stoning. In Osama, an entire gender is holding its breath.

Barmaq spent the Taliban years in exile in Peshawar, and says the incidents in his film are based on many true stories. A horrifying scene in the religious school, where an ancient mullah instructs boys on proper genital hygiene--including something called a "wet dream ablution"--has its roots in the two hours of radio propaganda on washing and sexual relations delivered daily by the Taliban during its reign. Barmaq's decision to give none of his characters a personal name except the girl (dubbed "Osama" by a young male protector) echoes his belief that the regime literally stole everyone's personality, making it part of a generic whole.

In the title role, Golbahari is heartbreakingly passive, cowed by years of stress and hardship. Wordlessly, she plants a braid of her hair in an earthen pot and waters it, perhaps hoping its survival will secure her own. But the movie mostly resists sentimentality, and even political preaching, allowing the images to speak for themselves. When a demonstration of widows is brutally disrupted by Taliban forces using water hoses and guns, the sodden placards swimming in a sea of blue burkhas--bearing the words "We are hungry" and "We are not political"--are reminders that politics is often a luxury of the well-fed.

Honored last year by both the Cannes Film Festival and the Foreign Press Association, Osama introduces itself with the words of Nelson Mandela: "I can forgive, but I cannot forget." Most people who see this movie will be able to do neither.