Allyson Hallman: Kandahar

     I thought Kandahar was an okay film for me because the characters were just so dry, and as Varzi points out, “[his characters] are devoid of personal history.” It was almost like they were feigning passion about something because the director didn’t want them to be animated, possibly as a way of trying to convey the overall lack of morale in Afghanistan. For example, aside from Nafas who is clearly monotone throughout the entire film, when Khak is really pushing for Nafas to buy the ring he took from a skeleton, his voice raises a tiny bit to convey the urgency and persistence in his voice, but his facial expression doesn’t change to match that. A second example of a dry character is the one guy who lost half of his arm but wanted to take a pair of legs to sell them. He too raised his voice just the tiniest bit to convey persistence to the Red Cross workers, but his face barely changed and the rest of his mannerisms and gestures were plain and unanimated. Maybe that’s just how the Afghan people are and the director wanted to convey that, but it sure made for a boring movie, in my opinion. Maybe, as Varzi speculated, the “stories [would] be too harsh, too political, too confusing, and too vivid if the narrative elaborated on the internal motives and struggles of the characters.” But personally, I would rather watch a super intense film than a super calm and relatively boring one.

     Overall, I do agree with Varzi’s critique of Kandahar. One line that particularly stood out to me from her article was, “Subtly showing the effect of an aggressive act is more effective than showing the actual act” (932). I didn’t initially notice this when we watched the film in class, but now that she points that out in her article, I do agree that, no matter how underwhelming the movie was overall, certain scenes did a very good job of showing the effect rather than the aggression. For example, not once does Makhmalbaf include a scene showing Nafas’ sister as a little girl, touching a doll that hides a land mine and getting wounded, nor does he even show her sister in her present state, preparing to commit suicide within a couple days’ time, yet we're rooting for Nafas to successfully complete her journey to Kandahar and reach her sister before the eclipse.