Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar is an absurdist, sometimes heavy-handed, but never less than evocative ode to the Afghan woman. Nafas (Nelofer Pazira, re-enacting her own real-life struggle) is a Canadian reporter hoping to reach Kandahar before her sister commits suicide during the next solar eclipse. Nafas is aware of the country’s female suffrage, recording her observations with a hand-held tape recorder. Crossing the desert with an opportunistic youngster (Sadou Teymouri), she discovers the extent of her former country’s poverty through a series of comical encounters that take her from an African-American doctor’s outpost to a Red Cross station where limbless men beg for artificial legs and hands.
Kandahar becomes noticeably scatterbrained whenever it strays away from Nafas, as in scene, however authentic, where a tyrannic teacher instructs young boys on the Koran. “They don’t need a doctor here, they need a baker,” says doctor Tabib (Hassan Tantai), an obvious acknowledgement of the nation’s plight. In the end, the man’s ruminations on hope and God are considerably more haunting (“For women, hope is the day she will be seen”).
The documentary feel of Kandahar’s episodic narrative is organic yet somewhat at odds with the story’s absurdist underpinnings. And while it might seem fastidious to fault the unprofessional cast, the film’s performers are considerably less deft at handling the material’s comedy than they are at rendering the horror of their everyday lives.
Makhmalbaf’s visuals are nonetheless breathtaking, as in a moment where crippled men chase after prosthetic limbs falling from the sky. And the film’s finale, of men in hijabs trying to blend in with the women around them in order to enter the titular city, is both funny and unbelievably sad. The light that seeps in through Nafas’s veil creates a prison pattern on her face, evoking the country’s subjugation of women. Now that Taliban forces have fallen in Kandahar, one can only hope that Afghan women will soon be seen.
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