Flak Magazine: Review of Kandahar, 1-18-02

It seems churlish to berate a film as well meaning as Kandahar. Set in the refugee camps near Afghanistan's border with Iran, and based on the true story of an Afghan-Canadian journalist who attempted to rescue a Afghan friend, depressed and possibly suicidal after years of war and Taliban rule, the movie, directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Apple), depicts the hardships that blight most Afghan lives. It's a noble gesture, and one of unexpected relevance, yet the film fails, feeling at times like nothing more than a humorless, tedious lecture.

Nafas — played by Nelofer Pazira, the journalist who inspired the film — is a young woman hurrying to Kandahar to save her sister, who has threated to kill herself at the time of the last eclipse of the millenium. Finding her way to the border, Nafas tries to reach Kandahar, first by posing as the fourth wife of a family traveling in her direction, then by hiring an untrustworthy boy as a guide and finally by pretending to be part of a wedding party. Along the way, she is humiliated by wearing a burqa, rests near a school filled with young boys reciting the Koran and comes to a Red Cross camp overwhelmed by the victims of land mines.

With such material, the potential for a powerful and emotional film is enormous. Kandahar rises to that potential periodically, almost entirely through the beauty of its images. Stunningly composed and shot, the film offers such bizarrely balletic moments as the sight of prosthetic legs drifting on parachutes to the ground, while surprisingly graceful amputees on crutches race to catch a pair. The final scenes, of a crowd of women accompanying a bride, are particularly arresting, with the bright colors and billowing fabrics of the women's burqas set against the bleak and muted desert landscape creating a lovely and joyous impression. But look closely at those scenes, and it is possible see the awkwardness of walking in a burqa and the desperation in the eyes of the amputees as they run for the legs.

Contrast those few moments of troubling beauty with the heavy-handed speeches Nafas encounters as she drifts from one grim sight to another on her journey. In one scene, children are taught to avoid land mines; in another, amputees show off their scars to Red Cross workers as they explain how they lost their limbs. The plight of women under Taliban rule is given great attention. In these scenes, Nafas fades into the background as nameless characters come to the fore to offer leaden commentary on the suffering afflicting so many, and the movie retreats from its promise.

There are fleeting moments of levity — the sight of a group of men wearing burqas in a scene near the end is mildly humorous — but like a mourner smothering a laugh at a funeral service out of fear that to find humor at such a moment would be grossly inappropriate, the characters in Kandahar seem to constantly remind themselves — and thus, the audience — that they are miserable, that nothing can distract from that misery, and that to give in to an emotion other than misery would somehow lessen the impact of all that is depicted. But that is not so; the effect is to make the horrors of Afghan life appear simplistic.

The mawkish, precious narrator Nafas is another impediment to appreciating Kandahar. She speaks throughout the movie into a tape recorder, uttering such maudlin sentences as "I bring hope like a 1,000 suns for you, my sister." When offered a gun for protection, she smiles beatifically and says "I don't need it," despite having already witnessed one robbery at knifepoint and the evidence of other dangers during her travels.

What really sinks Kandahar is its ponderous, didactic tone. It is undeniable that Afghanistan, ravaged by more than two decades of war, is a country filled with violence and corruption, disease and hunger, that life there is almost impossibly difficult and poor, and that until recently very little international attention was paid to the suffering of the Afghans. But Makhmalbaf's vision of life there as tragic and hopeless is relentless, and as the credits begin, it is not Nafas' journey or Afghanistan that audiences are thinking of — it is their gratitude that the movie is finally over.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)