Afghanistan: Osama (2003)
Sometimes, it’s hard to like a film. David Cronenberg’s Crash, for instance, is a masterpiece, but it’s a cold, brutal film. I admire it, but it’s also the very antithesis of “fun”. A film doesn’t need to be fun to be admirable, nor does it need to be a film you “like”. Schindler’s List is never going to feature in a run down of knockabout comedies, but it’s also a film that many people admire. (Some may find it overly manipulative and a trifle too calculating, but that’s a completely different discussion for a different blog.)
Osama is such a film.
Afghanistan is a country with issues, historically so and recently so. I was never expecting a film from Afghanistan to be in any way fun. So when Osama opens with a premise ripped straight from Shakespearean comedy I was quite surprised.
The Taliban are retaking chunks of the country, and freedoms the female population had been enjoying are removed. Three generations of women living together face a terrible choice; as all the men in the family have been killed, and the women are now not allowed to work, they will starve. If they disguise the youngest member of the family as a boy, she might be able to work and bring in some money.
So far, so The Kabul of Errors. Unfortunately the film swiftly veers into different territory and instead becomes Titus Andronicus.
What happens to young Osama (the girl is never given a first name of her own, a presumably deliberate choice to show just how little agency these women have – even her assumed name is given to her by another boy) starts off as troubling before turning disturbing and finally ending as horrifying. The very worst thing is that at the end, as she faces an unpleasant fate, the audience find themselves relieved that it’s not much, much worse – despite the fact that it’s already very bad.
I felt powerless. I don’t know what I can do about this, I don’t know how I can change anything about this girl’s life, and given that the film is now 23 years old I don’t even know if life in Afghanistan is any better. That’s how powerless I feel.
I’m also slightly troubled by the aesthetics of the film, because it’s presented in a highly documentary fashion, but it’s clearly not a documentary. Yes, I believe this could happen and yes, I believe that this is what would happen, but just how real is it? I don’t know, and the opening in particular – which seems literally to be filmed by a filmmaker we later see being sentenced to death – blurs lines further. I realise the film itself can’t help that I am watching it two decades later, but I wish it had been longer and more context had been provided. I wish it had been clearer. Or, perhaps, I wish I’d seen it at the time it was made, because that is clearly when it was meant to be seen. Most of all, I wish I had answers, but then maybe that’s the point of the film after all: raising questions, without offering neat solutions.
Disc: DVD (Region 2, UK)
Source: eBay
Availability: Out-of-print but still widely available; Region 1 edition is the same