Kandahar
“Shall I recite the Koran for the dead?”
Started in 2000 in Iran near the Afghan border, shot in haphazard and difficult conditions, and completed the following year in time for the Cannes film festival in May, Kandahar has taken on a prominence unforeseen by Makhmalbaf thanks to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The film has stimulated so much buzz over the past four months that I was one of the suckers who fell for the false rumor flying around last fall that George W. Bush had requested a screening of it in the White House–probably because I wanted to believe it, though I marveled at the time that it might have been the first subtitled movie he’d ever seen. The rumor has had so much staying power that it was still being repeated in the London press in early January. Clearly someone has a good press agent.
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The story concerns an exiled Afghan journalist named Nafas (Nelofer Pazira) who arrives at the Iran-Afghanistan border determined to find her sister, who’s suffering under the rule of the Taliban and has threatened to kill herself in three days, at the time of a solar eclipse. As the Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt has noted, the eclipse–an image of which opens and closes the film–functions as a poetic symbol for women living behind the veil. While Nafas travels cross-country by diverse means–guided first by an old man from a refugee camp, who has her pose as his fourth wife, though this makes no difference when they’re stopped by bandits, and then by a boy expelled from a religious school for not reciting a passage from the Koran correctly–burkas become part of an absurdist shell game, similar to the absurdist proliferation of artificial limbs used to replace those lost to land mines. The lost limbs aren’t absurd, but Makhmalbaf’s treatment of the amputees’ incessant demands for artificial replacements renders them so, deliberately unsettling us in the process. Nafas’s next guide and companion is a black American named Sahib, who’s acting as a lay doctor to ailing Afghans and is followed around by a one-armed man who hides under a burka. After Nafas and the amputee join a bride and part of her wedding entourage, the whole party gets stopped and searched by the Taliban.
Kandahar is a departure insofar as it’s his first film in which a fair amount of English is spoken. (Coincidentally, the same is true of Kiarostami’s latest film, ABC Africa–a documentary motivated no less than Kandahar by concern about an ongoing crisis, though it keeps a clear touristic distance from the foreign culture being shown.) Makhmalbaf’s lack of ease with the language leads to an undeniable clunkiness in much of the dialogue delivery and acting of his nonprofessional cast. Yet the use of English clearly wasn’t an error from a commercial standpoint, because it makes the film more user-friendly for American audiences. Even more ironically, the most striking use of English comes from a native speaker–the American actor, identified in the cast list as Hassan Tantai, who was recently discovered by Makhmalbaf and others to be David Belfield, the man who allegedly assassinated a member of the shah’s secret police in Washington, D.C., during the Iranian revolution, escaped to Iran, and later fought the Russians in Afghanistan. (Other names he reportedly has used include Hassan Abdul Rahman and Daoud Salahuddin.)
