Strong meat drawn in the style of storybook watercolors (stunningly so, often with characters simplified to little more than a slash & a dab of wash), Zabou Breitman & Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec’s animated film (from Yasmina Khadra’s novel) has a Dickensian narrative pull and structure to it, detailing the lives of a few ‘ordinary’ people in the destroyed city of Kabul under the Taliban where life is very much ‘the worst of times.’ The main characters are a young married couple (University prof; artist), chafing against zealot religious rules & regulations, living in virtual imprisonment in their empty apartment. (For the wife, having to wear the burka to go out a particular horror.) And the male jailer at a women’s prison, living thru the final days of his cancer ravaged wife. An accidental death will bring the two stories together, revealing a chance for escape, but only thru unimaginable tragedy. The climax a particular horror as a soccer game against a visiting Pakistani team gets a special opening act: political & religious motivated public executions (in a variety of methods) for your approval and entertainment. If this sort of horror true? Would a foreign team agree to such a thing? Devastating stuff, even with the distancing format of a Dickensian drama, presumably straight from the novel. Here, purposefully done in an enchantingly lovely visual style that only makes the Taliban religious madness & mania stand out in grisly relief.
DOUBLE-BILL: Surprising to see that Marjane Satrapi’s superb PERSEPOLIS/’07, a highly stylized b&w animated film about a girl’s coming-of-age under the Islamic Revolution in Iran, came out five years after Yasmina Khadra’s 2002 novel was published.
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