Change Your Image
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Reviews
Safar-e Ghandehar (2001)
Horror without violence
This movie is not for those brought up on a diet of Hollywood entertaining blockbusters with amazing special effects, thrilling and twisting plots, character development and a satisfying denouement.
Kandahar by an acclaimed Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, carries different layers of meaning, conveyed creatively through an artistic process. The image as a language is more powerful than words can ever convey. He uses "real" people rather than actors to enhance authenticity.
Afghani-Canadian, Nafas, has three days to save her despairing sister from suicide in Kandahar, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but can't enter it normally because of her journalist credentials. Her only choice is to trek from the Iranian border. Mohsen uses this narrative to capture the horrendous ravages and severe plights of a war-torn country steeped in an oppressive culture for women and shackled by the terrifying ideology of the Taliban. He employs no special effects, no physical violence, no explosions, not a single gunshot, not a single drop of blood - just images of everyday life.
Nafas can't travel as an unaccompanied woman and she must wear the head to toe burqa covering. For us the burqa is a symbol of the woman's oppression, to the Afghani male it's his honor. Women are meant to be largely invisible, so poignantly captured in family photo portraits. A doctor can only examine his female patient through a small hole in a curtain separating the two and communicate indirectly via a third party such as an accompanying child. Girls are removed from schools en masse. "For a woman living under full cover hope is for a day she'll be seen."
The austere landscape reinforces the grinding poverty and the meager means of existence, inevitably giving rise to lawlessness and a survival instinct that grabs every opportunity for financial gain. And there is little chance of escaping this hopelessness as the only aspiration for a boy is to be a mullah, a religious figure, through meaningless rote memorization of the Koran evidenced by repetitions of a mantra venerating the only technology allowed – the AK47 rifle.
The most chilling indictment of the war is the hordes of people with missing limbs blown up by land mines which litter the entire country. The most important currency for these people is the prosthetic limb for which they are entitled only one per year. Everyone, including the able-bodied, needs a pair, just in case. The surrealism of a horde of guys racing on crutches to receive crude prosthetic limbs parachuting down from the sky sears the mind.
The large bridal party adorned in their fluttering multi-colored burqas (supposedly covering only women) trudging across the barren landscape in rhythm to a numbing chant and tribal drumbeat heading towards a wedding in Kandahar conveys a notion of traditional bliss and innocence. That vanishes like a mirage when the party is intercepted at a Taliban checkpoint.
The curious presence of an African American looking for God, but ends up as a "doctor" administering whatever relief he can to basic health issues, is a statement that the core problem in Afghanistan is not religion per se but a dysfunctional country in a state of crippling deprivation of everything.
This movie was released in 2001, a decade after Taliban forces, aided and abetted by the United Sates, defeated the might of the then Soviet Union in their misguided and disastrous attempt to invade Afghanistan. This left the shattered country at the mercy of the extremist ideologically driven Taliban. The United States' response to 9/11 was to invoke a war against terror targeting the same Taliban forces. More bombs and military destruction followed. The country has once again been plunged into unimaginably crippling devastation.
The overarching message of this movie is the carnage and utter futility of war in bringing about desired social outcomes. It would appear Americans have neither learned the lessons of the Vietnam War nor from the Soviet's recent experience. Bombs and other military hardware are useless against an enemy with neither significant infrastructure nor targets to be destroyed. Deploying highly equipped alien boots on the ground is not going to win the hearts and minds of a population devoid of the means of livelihood, scarred by decades of war and lacking the education to escape this quagmire. The entire country becomes an even more fertile ground for breeding and recruiting terrorists – the antithesis of the war's objective. The American effort in Afghanistan is reputed to cost $1 billion each day. Imagine this amount redirected into developing and educating the country instead.
Makhmalbaf makes a pointed reference to the total uselessness of the UN. Its flag, being a symbol of neutrality that was meant to protect the traveling party, ended up planted next to a human skeleton in the desert. The only thing of tokenistic "value" recovered from the skeleton was a bejeweled ring, which ended up being worthless.
The Gardener (2012)
Conversation between two cameras
"The Gardener" is motivated by Iranian award-winning filmmaker Mohsen Makhamalbaf's desire to find out more about the Baha'i Faith. Adherents of the Faith have been gruesomely persecuted by Muslim ecclesiastics ever since its inception in mid-nineteenth century Persia, now Iran. Such unrelenting systematic persecution continues today, despite the community being the largest religious minority. Yet little is understood of the Faith in the land of its birth.
Though not a Baha'i, Mohsen is no stranger to controversy himself. He has been imprisoned for past political activism and his films banned. Entering Israel, where the Faith's spiritual and world administrative center is located, to make this film, can subject him to five years imprisonment back home. He now lives in Paris.
This is not your normal documentary laden with facts and figures, with neither heavy references to religious texts nor even interviews with senior representatives of the Faith. There are no actors. The few Baha'i interviewees are all young volunteer workers from diverse backgrounds with no claim to any authoritative or in-depth understanding of the Faith. Not surprisingly no Iranian Baha'i is included if one were cognizant of the consequences. This curious choice of young nobodies, positively inspired and animated by a broad range of uplifting principles from their faith, should resonate well with an entire generation of totally dispirited and disenchanted youth in Iran today who has never experienced the positive inspirational influence of religion.
Mohsen believes in the power of the language of the image and in the conversational style of storytelling. He engages his son, Maysam, as the second camera representing the skeptical and impatient younger generation, with a third invisible camera filming the "conversation" between the two. This conversation is the religious debate between father and son interspersed throughout that is the dialogue that binds the film together. The dichotomy between the positive father and negative son is further accentuated by their camera styles, the slow and meditative father with the fast moving pace of the son. Maysam thinks a Hollywood celebrity actor would enhance the film's popularity while Mohsen wants real people so he can develop "perception through concentration." "Don't try and capture a series of shots one after the other as if you're changing channels with a remote control." The son replies, "ten seconds is enough". The sub- text I think is if you're going to understand this Faith, you need time and reflection.
The third protagonist, giving the film its title, is the young Baha'i gardener, Eona, from obscure Papua New Guinea. The father is riveted on the young gardener. He takes his shots stealthily from behind one tree to the next, as his camera "meditates" on the devotional attitude, the intricate care, the peace and contentment of his subject, evoking the Baha'i concept of "work is worship".
Through the "real people", the diverse youth volunteers, we are exposed ever so fleetingly to some broad principles and concepts such as progressive revelation, that all religions derive their authority and inspiration from the same source, humanity's organic unity expressed through the quote "Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch" as well as appreciating its diversity like "flowers of one garden", the emancipation of women, that "heaven" and "hell" relate to states of our soul rather than destinations, that religion can transform the heart what science cannot, and that the human heart is like a mirror that needs to be polished before it can reflect the rays of the sun, the divine attributes. Mohsen turned the mirror metaphor into an artistic performance between the two of them using the colorful garden and rolling waves of the sea as rich tapestries.
The religious debate between father and son is conducted in more secular tones. He can see that religion, like his camera, needs regular updating. He effuses positively: "If religion can educate innocent children in such a way, that they're prepared to die and kill, then it proves that religion has power. Why not use the power of religion for the promotion of peace and friendship." The son trots negatively that organized religions are the source of conflict. He accuses his Dad of using technology to serve superstition while the Dad countered "you are turning technology into a new religion. You are creating from Steve Jobs a Moses, Jesus or Muhammad."
Maysam decides to go to Jerusalem where some of the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam and Judaism reside in close proximity. The contrast between the commercialism, cacophony, touristy ambiance commingling with the religious in Jerusalem and the absolute peace, serenity and uplifting beauty and order of the Baha'i gardens cannot be more distinct.
Here Maysam muses: "Why did God only begin to send prophets only three thousand years ago, and even then, three major religions, connected to each other by the same streets?" Little did he know that had he been more reflective, the answer lay back in Haifa.
In the end, Maysam asks his father: "Have you become a Baha'i?" He answered he is Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Zoroastrian, irreligious and all of these. Perhaps he has made some progress, acknowledging the common foundation of all religions but his watering of his "planted" camera, mimicking Eona's watering of a garden plant, suggests he's half-mocking.
Mohsen's noble message is to make use of the powerful positive inspirational peace-loving aspect of religion to solve the region's intractable problem which essentially is a manifestation of a negative human trait – hate.
The Reader (2008)
A love microcosm - metaphor of post-war Germany
This is a non-linear narrative of a relationship between two incongruous protagonists, aged a generation apart, set in post-WWII Germany.
Over the summer of 1958, fifteen year old school teenager Michael Berg (David Kross/Ralph Fiennes) fortuitously through an illness entered into the lonely non-abstract world of Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a thirty-six year old tram conductor, who carried a tightly kept life-long debilitating personal secret. She bartered sex that satisfied his youthful lust for his lively literature reading sessions that colored her world. He fell deeply in love while she remained rather nonchalant and mysteriously disappeared from his life one day without a trace.
Eight years later, as a law student observing a court trial of ex-SS guards, Michael was stunned to see Hanna as one of the defendants. In the ensuing court room drama, her personal secret was threatened with exposure. It was then that Michael realized what it was and the enormous sacrifice she was prepared to bear by assuming the guilt of others in order to preserve it.
Shocked by the revelation of her horrid past, tinged by fear of social ostracism for his association, yet still captivated by his love for her, and constrained by knowing that she was unwilling to reveal her secret, he was unable to find the moral compass to intervene in her favor during the trial.
During her years of incarceration he found comfort in continuing his reading sessions copiously but remotely through the medium of tape recordings. It was this long and dedicated labor of love that eventually enabled her to overcome the 'albatross around her neck'. She in turn indirectly provided the catharsis that liberated him from the torment of his covert relationship for most of his adult life. However, don't expect a happy Hollywood ending!
Based on Bernhard Schlink's novel, now a standard text in the German school curriculum for understanding the country's history and the first German novel to top the New York Times' bestseller list, the microcosm of Hanna and Michael, weaved into the country's tumultuous post-war soul searching, was a complex set of metaphors for a country grappling with the truth, meaning and reconciliation of its past emotional and moral morass.
The innocent naivety of the immediate post-war generation was shattered when they discovered the crimes perpetrated by those whom they loved and cherished. They had to come to terms with the past, struggle to comprehend its meaning. Michael's emotional turmoil following his awakening to her secret and past history represented what was exactly happening in his society.
The personality traits of Hanna could be portrayed as being reminiscent of Hitler's Germany. Yet there was much humanity that seeped through that facade - her unsolicited act of kindness to Michael's illness which was the genesis of the liaison, her thorough emotional immersion in his readings, her rapturous response to the church choir, her attempt at reconnecting with him near the end, and her final remorseful acts. We could not hate her. Liberation from their respective debilitating secrets conveyed a positive metaphor for the country's future.
"You don't have to apologize to anyone!" "Nothing comes out of the camps." "Love completes the soul." "Society thinks they are guided by morality but in fact they are following laws." "Why don't you start by being honest with me?" These are examples of many dialog pieces that were laden with meaning beyond the context of the narrative.