Burkarama

We saw the movie Osama a few weeks ago on the recommendation of a coworker. For those of you who don't know, Osama is the story of a young girl who is forced to pose as a boy because of Taliban restrictions on women. This was the first movie made in Afganistan after the taliban were ousted in 2001-2002, and critics of all cultural and political stripes fell over themselves to praise the film.

The problem with movies created after decades of religious-fundamentalist rule is that quality tends to go downhill. Just look at what Hollywood's been churning out lately.

The story jumps from one scene to another with no sense of order or place. The acting, understandably, is god-awful. I'm sure they literally grabbed people off the street in these towns and put a camera in front of them. Even with subtitles it was hard to understand what was going on.

Even though the movie illustrated the horrible conditions that Afgans, especially women, had to endure under taliban rule, the flat and lifeless characters hardly illicited any sympathy. The girl, renamed Osama, cries through most of the film and never stands up for herself or, really, does much of anything.

I have to say that I'm impressed these folks managed to produce a movie at all under post-war conditions. Unfortunately, their good intentions have gone for naught.

A much better story about life in Afganistan is The Kite Runner, a fantastic novel by Khaled Hosseini that traces the life of a boy who grew up in relative welath before the soviet invasion, fled to the US with his father, then returns years later during the taliban years to seek atonement for a terrible sin he committed in his youth. A movie is in the works, and should be coming out next year or the year after.