Reviews and critics' ratings, as well as reviews of the film Osama (Netherlands, Ireland, Japan, Afghanistan, Iran, 2003)
All reviews of the movie Osama
Osama (2003, Netherlands, Ireland, Japan, Afghanistan, Iran), IMDb: 7.3
Afisha review of the film
A 12-year-old big-eyed Afghan woman, who lives in a adobe hut with her mother and grandmother, is dressed as a boy and sent to work – all the men in the family were killed, there is nothing to eat, and the working women are stoned by the Taliban. Having become even more beautiful because of the cropped head, the child wanders around half-dead Kabul, gouged by artillery – defenseless in front of bearded men patrolling the city in dirty SUVs, wild peers and obscene old men who, according to a good tradition dating back to 1001 nights are not inclined to exaggerate the difference between boy and girl.
Osama – the first film produced in post-Taliban Afghanistan, having traveled almost all the festivals of the world, received its portion of both humanitarian sobs and jokes about the fact that the Golden Globe (his film was given last winter) is given only to those small cinemas, in the homelands of which the United States has already bombed. The validity of the latter observation, however, does not detract from the real merits of the picture – it is a compact, surprisingly lively movie, not boasting (which is rare for the notorious small cinemas) of its naivety, and not naive at all, on the contrary – freely and skillfully walking through several levels of reality at once : the actors here play more or less themselves, and at some point the operator is dragged out from behind the camera in order to bring him to the Sharia court. To say that the film of Barmak (by the way, a VGIK graduate) possessed some kind of armor-piercing crushing artistic power is pretty prevaricating. Those who are convinced that the suffering of the peoples of the third world is such a special bullshit, invented by local filmmakers in order to breed tearful festival selectors, will remain unconvinced. Those who are ready for a moment to admit the existence somewhere far away of a completely different life and other problems will feel sorry for the child and ashamed of their own, for example, yesterday's complaints about the inability to buy fresh strawberries in Moscow in winter. Although such tiny and short-lived shifts in the minds of the inhabitants of Moscow or, say, Berlin, of course, are not worth the bitter tears of an Afghan girl – real or fictional, it does not matter.
The best reviews of the film Osama
What vulgarity! Not bad, in fact, the script was made a propaganda tool.
Naturally, I expected to see something like Kandahar – a talented film about life, hard and bright, beautiful and complex – different. Having reached the middle of Osama, she began to be tormented by doubts – too biased: the Taliban, unambiguously, are bastards and murderers; everyone in Afghanistan, unequivocally, is bad and hungry. It's all the fault of the Taliban. It's that simple.It would be necessary to find out who the director seems to be a European or American. No – Siddik Barmak, obviously not a European. Marvelous. We look further – here it is! This manifesto was released by the company Metro-Goldvin-Maire, and produced by Frank Mannon and Julia Fraiser. It would be foolish to think. Once again, I am convinced of the stupidity of this nation: the Americans think that the whole world is as stupid as America, and will fall on such anxiously brewed bait. Well: if you have a force, you can not have a mind, without it it is even easier.
A very informative film from the life of women in Afghanistan. After him, I want to give praise to the Christian god and shake hands with the ancestors and followers of feminism, and even more acute you understand the difference between live and survive.
Osama, Osama, Osama. Thanks to Siddika Barmaku, Osama is now not Ben Laden for us. Osama is a girl, haircut under a boy, and his braid in a clay pot with the ground – in an absolutely children's hope that she will germinate. Usama is a boy with a girl’s frightened eyes, diligently climbing the bark and branches of a dry tree under the hooting of genuine boys – in the fear of inevitable exposure. Usama is a girl sentenced to become a woman under a hinged castle – a fee for salvation from imminent death (mullah gesture, which is hardly called disinterested). Osama now is the embodiment of many Afghan women, doomed to the Taliban for hungry death, at least the only fact that their men died in one of the infinitely next war – with the Soviet Lee, with the American or almost everyday war Between Pashtuns and everyone else, inhabiting this troubled land, in which you can only hide in mountain gorges.
Siddik Barmak – a graduate of VGIK, Minister of Cinema of Afghanistan during the “BC” and “after the Taliban, and during the break, adviser to Ahmad Shah Masuda (the legendary leader of the Afghan resistance of the time of the“ Soviet ”occupation) – shot genuine cinema about genuine pain that settled on Afghan soil . Siddik Barmak dared to the debut in 41 years and won: he won not only a large number of prizes, the approval of the audience and respect for his colleagues, but also a place in history – cinema and Afghanistan.
Osama is the second film about Afghanistan over the past decade, which has reached our eyes and hearing through a wide screen. The first is the “Kandahar” by Mokhsena Mokhmalbaf, whose active nature significantly helped the shooting of “Osama”. Both films are about Afghanistan from the Taliban regime. Both films are about female destinies that were never easy on this earth, but it was the Taliban rules that made their existence unbearable.
For any European, the situation of a woman in Afghanistan clearly illustrates the anti -human regime of the Taliban, and in the case of “Superior” – the illustration is convex and sharp to pain in the eyes, because the child’s painful entry into the big world here takes forms that are impossible in the paradigm of thinking And the experience of the European viewer.Namely, Europe (in the collective sense) is the address of statements for both directors. In both cases, plots are woven into the very fabric of the narrative, one way or another denoting the European (humanistic) view. In the case of Kandahar, the very plot of the film is based on the journey of an Afghan immigrant living in Canada, who ventured to go to her abandoned homeland at the call of her sister. Throughout the film, the heroine travels with a voice recorder in her hands, recording the path of her journey along the way and making travel notes with alien eyes. In Osama, the presence of another, external gaze is not so direct, but perhaps more pronounced. The very first shots of the film – a demonstration of the protest of husbandless (and therefore hungry) women, were filmed with someone else's, as it were, an objective look – the camera of a foreign journalist. The second outsider is a woman who treats patients at a local hospital, which the Taliban close down and put the volunteer in a zindan. Then the Taliban will stone both Gentiles to death for daring to spy on their sovereign world. And yet, this execution is not only an illustration of the atrocities of the Taliban regime (and not only the Taliban kept women under lock and key), but also a timeless and very visible proof of the impossibility of rapprochement of inherently different cultures, and an attempt to warn Europeans from imposing their own model of the world. Here it is impossible not to recall the heroes of the works of Paul Bowles – Port and Kit, bogged down in the Arabian desert and who lost their body and soul there (the novel Under the Cover of Heaven, accurately and very cinematically filmed at the time by Bertolucci), as well as the brightest An illustration of the suicidality of attempts to comprehend someone else's is the story A Distant Case.
Having given the girl and the film the name Osama, Barmak also warns us against the stereotypical perception of the Islamic world, debunking an already established cliché – not every Osama carries with him the threat of terrorism. For a girl, this name is a charm, an entrance ticket to the boyish world.
So Barmak is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Picking up a purely European weapon – the only surviving 35-mm movie camera in the whole of Afghanistan, he only tries on the cassock of a rabid humanist. In fact, it does not at all reduce the depth of the East-West abyss, but only fixes it. The troops of the united coalition or single volunteers will not exterminate violence and pain on this earth: having freed Afghanistan from the Taliban, we have not freed its inhabitants from war, devastation and hunger, and women from life under lock and key.
