'OSAMA' Story of girl disguised as boy gives Taliban further scorn

Movies were banned under the repressive regime.
By TERRY LAWSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Despite its attention-getting, off-putting title, "Osama" is not technically about Osama bin Laden: It takes its name from that adopted by a 12-year-old girl who, to survive in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, is compelled to masquerade as a boy. When classmates in a training school become suspicious, a sympathetic acquaintance tells them her name is Osama. Even in a pre-9/11 Afghan society, this is like calling yourself "Butch" or "Spike."
"Osama" is destined to be known as the first film to be made in the country after the Taliban were removed from power. When the Taliban took over in 1996, they declared movies sinful, which meant there was no reason to make them.
Director Saddiq Barmak clearly had a reason to make this response, which depicts the Taliban as even more repressive and vindictive than we might have imagined, which is an accomplishment in itself. From its opening scene to its last, "Osama" is as single-minded as any American World War II film in its depiction of the enemy: They are only marginally human.
Yet Barmak is able to construct a convincing illusion of naturalism by shamelessly copying the style of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, whose films "Under the Olive Trees" and "The White Balloon" have had enormous influence on Middle Eastern filmmakers. "Osama" has little of Kiarostami's unadorned artfulness, probably because Barmak did not have to hide behind metaphor.
But despite an absence of subtlety, the film has a very real impact. A fellow critic left this film in undisguised anger: "I hate those Taliban b------s," he said, and "Osama" makes it hard to disagree.
Opening images
The film begins with what is meant to resemble documentary footage of a young boy named Espandi (Arif Herati), looking at the camera as he twirls some sort of smoking device he contends will answer prayers and all but demands money for his service. After he is paid to go away by the cameraman, he hounds a passing woman and her daughter (Marina Golbahari), but he is soon distracted by a parade of women, all wearing burqas and protesting the Taliban law that prevents them from working. ("We are not political," one shouts.) The protest is soon broken up by Taliban enforcers, who, like Mississippi cops at a '60s civil-rights march, attack them with water hoses.
The mother, whose husband was killed in the war against the Soviets, is at wit's end and pleads with a local merchant and family friend to give her daughter a job stirring milk. But work is for males, which means the girl has her hair shorn and pretends to be a boy -- even though her voice threatens to give her away. Soon after, the merchant is visited by a mullah who takes the "boy" away to a camp, where she is befriended by a similarly conscripted Espandi. He tries to help her keep her secret by teaching her to climb a tree, giving her the new name and warding off the bullies who would expose her.
A natural feel
Barmak has not only adopted the aesthetic of Kiarostami and other students of the Mohsen Makhmalbaf film collective in Iran -- all the actors are nonprofessionals, the sound and lighting are natural, no music cues tell us what to feel -- Makhmalbaf loaned Barmak a 35 mm camera, the only one known in Afghanistan.
Cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri uses it to record some telling sequences, including a girl's uncovered feet dangling from a bicycle -- a double offense, the bike and the bare toes -- and a long sequence in which a loincloth-clad mullah at the Taliban school instructs a class on the proper Muslim way to wash one's genitals. As with most of these arbitrary rules, the mullahs seem to be making them up as they go along.