Kandahar Film Response- Molly McLaughlin

Roxanne Varzi's article on Mohsen Makhmalbaf's "Kandahar" backed up some of the main points about the film that I found to be most interesting. These were 1.) the fact that the actors seemed nearly untrained, and whether or not that was a calculated move on Makhmalbaf's part 2.) the underdeveloped nature of the characters and 3.) the lack of direct violence in a film set in a horrifically violent country. In many ways, I thought Varzi's article on the film was a bit harsh in it's criticism; however, I do think that she was on point when it came to Makhmalbaf's decisions on what story lines to persue and how to develop them.

While watching the film, my initial reaction to Nafas' character was that she was extremely dry and seemingly quite distant. While her character's story line would ususally provoke an emotional performance from, say, a Westernized actor, Nafas barely shares any emotion relating to her sister's impending suicide. This, inconjunction with the open-ended nature of Nafas' sister's suicide, leads to me to believe that that was not the main story the film was trying to develop.

I also thought it was an interesting move on Makhmalbaf's part to not include direct acts of violence in the film. Instead, Makhmalbaf decided to show the results of violence (i.e. the men missing legs, women and children starving etc.) to convey the despair and hopelessness that many Afghan people face on a daily basis.

I also thought it was quite interesting how many of the characters (Nafas and Khak; the Red Cross employees and the amputees etc.) often engage in conversations that boil down to pointless arguing. The scene that comes to mind, for me, is when Khak is trying to convince Nafas to buy the ring which he stole off a corpse. The entire exchange between them seemed drawn out and heavy handed and did not further the story line in any way. The same goes for the arguing between the Australian Red Cross workers and the man who did not want to accept a man's prosthetic legs for his wife. They go on and on for more than a minute arguing about the same thing and it seems like it would make sense from a director's standpoint to completely omit these scenes. For the simple fact that they are so odd to me, I felt that there might be some underlying meaning in them. Part of me thinks that maybe the director might be trying to make some kind of commentary on the language and culture barriers between Afghan citizens and Westernized peoples (Nafas, although born in Afghanistan, was currently residing in Canada during the time of the film) and how these barriers have led to many of the very serious problems that Afghanistan is plagued with today.