What's in a name?
Siddiq Barmak's Osama describes a world turned upside down.

By Robert Avila

FIRST, TWO weddings and two funerals: In a room in a private Kabul home, a group of brightly clad women sing and dance around a new bride, seated demurely but confidently beside a framed photograph of her groom – who has already left for Iran to look for work. Next comes a thunderous pounding at the door. The bride's father shuffles to the entrance and lets in a group of Taliban religious police. The women haven't missed a beat. The room now holds a wailing circle of black-shrouded mourners. "My mother has died," the man explains to his uninvited guests.

Cut to a group of wives of one man preparing his latest acquisition for her wedding day. This time marriage triggers a funereal grief all too real. The gaudy makeup the women apply to the barely pubescent bride runs with her tears as each woman bemoans her own abduction and enslavement to the ancient groom, a Taliban mullah. "My life is over," one says.

If the first metamorphosis speaks eloquently, and not without humor, to the defiant ingenuity of life coursing below the surface of a totalitarian system, the irony of the second is at most darkly humorous, and infinitely tragic. Between such extremes writer-director Siddiq Barmak's Osama describes the strategies and consequences of a world turned upside down, of a life continually perverted into its opposite.

The first Afghan feature film since the rise and fall of the Taliban centers on a 12-year-old Afghan girl (an affecting Marina Golbahari) who lives with her mother and grandmother in Kabul during the reign of the Taliban (1996-2001). Her male relatives were lost earlier to the war with the Soviets and the subsequent civil war, and with her mother unemployed (the hospital she worked at was closed down by the Taliban), the family faces starvation. Mother and grandmother take the desperate step of cutting the girl's hair and dressing her as a boy. In a nearly constant state of fear, the girl shoulders the responsibility of finding work and bringing home food.

Barmak turns the old story of a girl who passes as a boy in order to advance in a man's world into an account of brute survival. At the same time, as the two scenes described above suggest, the gender masquerade amounts to only one reversal in a film that progresses by contradictions.

When the Taliban seized power in 1996, the cosmopolitan inhabitants of the capital found themselves subjected to an improvised brand of Islamic fundamentalism from the hinterland that was unlike anything the city had known. Under the new regime, basic customs and practices of daily life in Kabul were outlawed. But the restrictions fell hardest on women, who could no longer work, or leave their homes without a male relative and a burqa, and could be severely punished for such offenses as exposing their ankles, wearing makeup, or laughing too loudly. Extramarital affairs could be and were met with public execution by stoning.

In the facial expressions and body language of his excellent amateur cast, Barmak, who fled Kabul two weeks after the Taliban invasion, captures the physiognomy of a war-shattered people, physically and mentally exhausted yet necessarily alert. They carry on warily, with furtive gestures of aid to one another and a guarded dignity. Around them lurk the Taliban, whom Barmak reveals somewhat sparingly at first, as much an atmosphere of menace as a physical presence. To this end, the film's soundtrack makes formidable use of eerie, even suffocating silences. And its visuals displace realistic representations of violence with alternative images and symbols (off-camera gunshots, the unlikely use of water cannons to break up a demonstration). It's as if the film were expressing a surfeit of violence, so recent and in many cases ongoing, precisely by denying it crudely realistic representation on-screen.

A few of Barmak's directorial choices are heavy-handed. The camerawork at the outset, for instance – supposedly the perspective of an American journalist with a video camera, which is soon abandoned – comes across as contrived. But the film compels the viewer with its aesthetically rich lingering on the details of life, a style obviously influenced by, among other things, Iran's decidedly humanist cinema. Moreover, Barmak's depiction of the way seemingly stable verities can end up transformed into their opposites (a wedding into a funeral, a child into a soldier, etc.) produces at its best an ingenious blending of form and content.

The film's title, which defies our initial expectation by making it the pseudonym of a 12-year-old girl, contains just such an irony. Like the veil in the first wedding scene, the name provides ironic cover for the child resisting the encroachments and strictures of an unwelcome regime. It's also a symbol of a stolen childhood, an imprisoned sex, and the branding of a population. With security and financial need still paramount concerns in an Afghanistan faced with a resurgent Taliban and dominated by warlords – many of whom keep Afghanistan's women in an equally miserable state of degradation – the final irony may be that Barmak's story is as much portent as history.

'Osama' opens Fri/20, Lumiere, 1572 California, S.F. Call for price. (415) 267-4893. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.