MOVIE REVIEW

A girl glimpses equality under the Taliban when she masquerades as a boy in "Osama."

By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer

The fictional Afghan film "Osama" takes place before U.S. bombs began falling on Kabul, when the Taliban was ravaging the country and its people under the cover of the world's indifference. The film is a view from the abyss that recounts the twined story of a girl forced into male disguise and bestowed the terrible name of Osama, and that of Afghani women whose right to exist was all but denied in the name of God. Raw and wretchedly current, it is a story that packs a cruel emotional wallop.

The story opens amid the decimated streets of Kabul with a young male beggar entreating an unseen man to give him money in exchange for blessings. The boy, a puckish type who swings around an incense holder like a yo-yo, leads the man, who in turn wields a compact video camera, to a surreal sight — that of hundreds of women streaming through the streets. Obscured by pale blue and gold burkas, brandishing desperate-sounding placards ("We are hungry!") and accompanied by scores of young children, the women are peacefully demonstrating for the right to work, a right denied them by the Taliban. For these women, many of whom have been widowed by the war against the Soviet Union, life without men has become no life at all.

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Soon after the boy leads the cameraman to the march, Taliban thugs disperse the protesters with clubs and, in an image that starkly invokes this country's civil rights protests, water cannons. Two of the protesters who escape are an unnamed widow (played, like all the characters, by a nonprofessional) and her 12-year-old daughter (another nonprofessional, doe-eyed Marina Golbahari), the film's title character and its heartbreaking center. Because the men in their lives are dead, mother, daughter and the girl's grandmother have become social outcasts, denied the chance to work or even beg for a living. "I wish my husband were alive," the widow weeps. "I wish I had a son instead of a daughter." She's granted her wish, after a fashion, when soon afterward her daughter takes to the streets dressed as a boy.

Once she slips on male clothes, the girl — whom the young beggar dubs Osama — enters a reality that's every bit as foreign to her as Oz was to Dorothy. In this parallel universe, children are permitted to study (albeit just the Koran) as well as to run, play and laugh, simply because they are boys.

How this girl, who has no name until she becomes Osama, navigates her double existence amid this deeply cloistered, strange male world (the eyeliner-wearing mullahs are truly visitors from another planet) gives the story the tingle of a thriller. For in this world, every stranger looms as a threat as does each of the girl's gasps of fear. Here, the mere act of skipping rope is more than an act of defiance — it is an invitation to disaster, even death.

Written and directed by Afghan-born Siddiq Barmak, "Osama" is among the first films shot in Afghanistan after the official ouster of the Taliban. That fact alone gives it a measure of importance, but worthiness doesn't make a movie interesting or even watchable, and for that you need a good director. Barmak may not have another film in him as fine as "Osama," but he's found a way into this story that works unexpectedly well. Taking a cue from modern Iranian cinema, he employs an unadorned documentary-inflected visual style that's far more aesthetically self-aware than it seems at first glance.

Indeed, one of the most powerful images in "Osama" is among the most humble, that of a woman's feet — dangling off the side of a bicycle and going nowhere fast.

'Osama'

MPAA rating: PG-13, for mature thematic elements

Times guidelines: Intense, upsetting scenes; persistent violence against women

Marina Golbahari...Osama

Khwaja Nader...the old mullah

Arif Harati...the boy beggar

Zubaida Sahar...the mother

Hamida Refah...the grandmother

An NHK and leBrocquy Fraser Ltd. co-production of a Barmak Films production, released by United Artists. Director, editor, writer Siddiq Barmak. Cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri. Sound Behrouz Shahamat, Farokh Fadai. Set designer Akbar Meshkini. Music Mohammad Reza Darwishi. In Dari Farsicq with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

Exclusively at Landmark's Westside Pavilion Cinemas, Westside Pavilion, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A., (310) 475-0202, and the ArcLight, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-4226.