Review: ‘Kandahar’ can’t match true story

Geoff Carter

Friday, Feb. 1, 2002 | 10:22 a.m.

"Kandahar" opens and closes with footage of an eclipse. It's a dual symbol, representing not just the urgency of "Kandahar's" desperate protagonist Nafas, but also the obstacles holding her back. When the light dims, her hopes will dim with it.

Several years ago Niloufar Pazira, an Afghan refugee and a journalist living in Canada, received a letter from a childhood friend back in Afghanistan, saying she intended to commit suicide. Desperate to intervene, Pazira asked Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf if he could get her across the border. He could not, but wrote "Kandahar" around her experiences.

In Makhmalbaf's retelling, Pazira becomes Nafas, and the friend becomes Nafas' sister. She lost both her legs on a land mine, and has become so tired and miserable under Taliban rule that she writes Nafas to tell her she plans to kill herself during the last eclipse of the 20th century.

Nafas sneaks across the border garbed in burqa -- the full hood the Taliban required all women to wear -- and begins a series of misadventures. She dictates a letter to her sister into a hand-held tape recorder that she prophetically calls her "black box."

"I give my soul to this journey," she says into the recorder, "and travel roads that I've never taken before, so I can give you reasons to live."

It isn't long before she begins to question her own. The family she pays to take her to Kandahar is robbed just inside the border, and deserts her. Nafas is forced to enlist the guidance of a number of untrustworthy men: a boy who strips valuables from corpses, a huckster who begs prosthetic limbs from the Red Cross and tries to sell them for cash, and an American Muslim who wears a false beard ("my burqa") and seems too interested in Nafas' quest.

Ultimately, Nafas' greatest enemy is time. Makhmalbaf sometimes forgets this; he takes his time telling stories of daily life in Afghanistan that are interesting from a documentary standpoint, but they detract from Nafas' story. Boys in schools are taught how to use semiautomatic weapons, and compose poetry to them. Crowds of amputees run for parachute drops of false limbs as if they were bundles of money.

Nafas doesn't see these things; she's too busy watching the clock. Never does she wonder if she'll get out of the country alive, which she might have if she could see the things happening out of her sight, but Makhmalbaf keeps her eyes trained on the heavens. She watches the sun nervously, wanting to stop it in the sky. She doesn't realize that her own clock is dangerously close to running down, and Makhmalbaf doesn't tell her -- or us.

As a portrait of a country devastated by years of unremitting hostility, "Kandahar" is devastating, almost surreal. Even the long-overdue defeat and removal of the Taliban regime doesn't blunt the film's impact. However, as a story, "Kandahar" is its own eclipse: The light at the end of the tunnel, and all the information its audience wants about the film's characters, are obscured by darkness.