Osama by Sadiq Barmak - Movie Review Example

Osama by Sadiq Barmak The film Osama (2002), directed by Sadiq Barmak, starring a young Afghani girl named Marina Golbaharai, stands as one of the most fascinating independent contemporary films to date. The story takes place in Afghanistan, when the country was ruled by the fundamentalist Taliban forces. The imposition of strict Islamic law and observance meant that a family of women, left without the social benefit of a male in the home to escort them in public and to work and to provide for them; meant isolation, no resources to survive under already difficult circumstances. That is the situation in which a young girl finds herself and she takes on the identity of a boy so that she and her mother can survive in a world where, without a man, they do not exist. She becomes Osama, a young boy, and her femininity, which is now more a threat than ever, is suppressed as she struggles to help take care of her mother. They are cannot carry the lie alone, and the grocer who hires her to work for him and a beggar, a stranger, who understands why the young girl is being forced to take on the identity of a boy helps her when she becomes suspect for not knowing the role of a male in the religious prayer traditions. She remains under suspicion and is eventually found out. Barmak found his star, Marina Golbahari, among the population of Afghanis. She was not a star, and certainly not by Hollywood standards. Nonetheless, she was recruited to play the starring role in this third cinema project, which is one of the first films to be produced and made in Afghanistan showing what life was like during the Taliban’s gripping rule over the country. Osama, along with other young boys, is forced into a Taliban school where the young boys are indoctrinated into Islamic fundamentalism. It is to be more than religious training. It is the way in which the Taliban bonded with young boys to gain their trust and allegiance not just as Muslims, but as Taliban Muslims. The first act was to round them up, make them think they were special, different than the women they left behind. The second was to put clothes on them and put them in a dormitory situation where they would bond with each other. For those children who were accustomed to spending their nights in the open or as homeless, it was perhaps the first roof over their heads that they could remember. There was food too, that they did not have to hustle for or steal. Clothes, that made them part of the group. They were, perhaps for the first time in their young lives, taken care of. This made them trust the Taliban, except for Osama, who had something to hide. All along the way, she was suspect because of her feminine appearance which could not be disguised. She was young, and already beautiful. Barmark chose well, because Marina Golbahari was a young girl at that cross-roads where she would soon leave behind her young child behaviors and appearance as her body transitioned to a young woman. This is what was could not be disguised, and the young boys by whom she was surrounded felt the magnetism of her femininity. When she was found out, they chased her down, treed her, like an animal. Osama understood the fear of the Taliban, she had seen people die, and knew that as women without men, she and her mother were doomed to the same. However, now she had found out impersonating a boy, and feared for her life. The fervor of the crowds of men surrounding her who want to punish her because she wanted to work and to take care of her mother causes the viewer to experience a range of emotions that help them bond even closer with the character of Osama. The opening scenes of the film that showed how little value women represented to the Taliban society has prepared the viewer for what would no doubt prove a horrific punishment for Osama for posing as a male in a male patriarchal society that turned its head while widows and young children starved because they were left without men to represent them socially. For any viewer who cannot fathom the dire circumstances that Osama is in, the fear in the child’s eyes conveys the unknown in a very convincing way. It is perhaps that Marina Golbahari knows from her real life experience what is in store for her that she can so convincingly convey the fear that she knows is real. At first, she is punished by being lowered into a well. The fear in the child’s face is real, and she knows that such punishments are real under fundamental Islamic law. The ultimate punishment is then inflicted upon the child when she is married off to an aging Mullah who ran the school. It seems the fitting punishment under Taliban law; to give over the girl to the Mullah, the man, whom she made look ridiculous with her charade. He has “earned” the Mullah a right to take her as his wife. The Mullah asserts his husbandly privilege and has sex with the child, in what is one of the emotional scenes that conveys the sense of helplessness that women suffer. The child is a victim of her own culture, and the sense is that it just should not be that way. This, after the emotional scene in the beginning when Osama – and we never know her real name – loses her hair in order to look like a boy. It is the prelude to the deflowering of the child’s innocence that will soon follow. As the strands of her hair fall to the floor and tears roll down the child’s face she tries to concentrate on the magic of a story that her grandmother is reciting to distract her from her humiliation. There is no missing the message of hardship for women in the Islamic life under the fundamentalist Taliban. As the crowds of men, aware of Osama’s deception, angrily seek to punish her, to torture her, by putting her down a water well, the terror that Osama expresses is real, because it is a punishment that invented, but which is real. The genius of this young actress rests in the fact that Barmak found her on the streets of Kabul, begging for food and cast her in his film. When there is the look of terror in the child’s eyes, the audience knows that she has indeed experienced terror. When there is the sense of shame, as when her dark silky locks of hair are being cut, there is a bonding between the women, but a shame in the fact that she must deny her own gender in order to survive. That her society would allow them to go without until they perish, and no one will miss them, no one will mourn, and it will be as if they have never existed. The plight of women under the control of Islamic fundamentalist, and it is a life that is frightening. There is a depth to Marina Golbahari’s acting that can only come from her knowledge of what her character is experiencing. Osama conveys a sense of resolution to her fate when she is forced to marry the Mullah, and almost a sense of relief when, finally, she has lost to him her virginity, because now there is nothing left for them to take from her. It was the only thing that she had of value in the society in which she lived. Now that it was gone, as was indicated by the many widows in the opening scenes of the film, she is without value and it is only the because of the tolerance of her Mullah benefactor that she lives at all. In a patriarchal society the lives of women are discretionary, that is subject to the discretion of the men who dominate that society. In an Islamic fundamentalist society women have been reduced even further, as the vessels for propagating the species. Without a man, there ceases to be propagation and, therefore, there ceases to be a utility or value assigned to the woman. It is a film that exposes a truth that western men and women are not prepared to deal with. That it comes out of a real experience, continuing experiences, is unsettling and the Western viewer finds that they do not have a place to go with the information. Where and how do they process this remains the haunting question of the film. Barmak, Siddiq. 2002. Osama, motion picture film. Warner Brothers Films, Afghanistan. Read More