Movie Moment
The Kite Runner
Perhaps the most revealing and painful impact of ‘The Kite Runner’ is the admission by Paramount Pictures that they made an error in casting local Afghan child actors. It was unintentional - the situation was not fully understood in terms of Afghan culture and history and the relationship between the Hazara and Pashtun people, said a spokesman.
So what exactly led to Paramount having to relocate the leading young actors and their guardians to the United Arab Emirates for their safety? The pivotal scene in the film - the rape of a young Hazara boy by the leader of a teenage gang of Pashtun bullies - is said to have brought death threats.
And whether from this downtrodden ethnic minority or the more powerful Pashtuns, and despite the destruction of the country’s cinemas by the Taliban, the child actors were, it seems, as much at risk as the characters they played in the film. The witnessing of this brutal rape by the well to do Pashtun best friend of the servant boy victim and rich boy’s reaction is the central theme in this tale of loyalty and treachery.The Oscar-worthy portrayal of the Hazara boy Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, and the performance of the increasingly loathsome son of the privileged household, Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) are remarkable.
Their story provokes the eternal questions – would we, the comfortable, self congratulatory cinemagoers, have the courage that Amir lacked? As children, in a tight spot did we side with the oppressed or the oppressors? If awash with jealousy and shame would we resort to treachery?
I went to see the film in trepidation, the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s best seller being among my favourite books, but Marc Forster’s film and David Benioff’s screenplay was pretty faithful to the original, despite some substance being lost in the screen version.
The compelling performances came from the Afghan boys, their persecutor Asef (Elham Ehsas) and Amir’s father Baba, played marvellously and with complete credibility by Homayoun Ershadi. Here was a father of heroic proportions, the kind of man who unarmed and fleeing with his son from Kabul after the Soviet invasion, would challenge a rifle wielding Russian soldier intent on defiling a woman refugee.
That the wretched Amir was a disappointment to his father and could not begin to measure up to the family’s lowly but admirable servant, Hassan, was almost bound to destroy a friendship built on Hassan’s devotion.
While Amir was the kite flyer in the fabulous kite fight above the city that was Kabul before the Russians and then the Taliban arrived, it was Hassan who was the awesome kite runner, with an almost mystic ability to locate and run down a falling kite. Set apart by his humble status, combined with courage and a strange kite running gift, he was a target, persecuted for his devotion to a friend who betrayed him.
It was many years before Amir (now played by Khalid Abdalla) was given the chance of redemption and called back to an Afghanistan where by now the bullies had grown to epic proportion. In a world where Taliban fundamentalist tyrants stoned young women to death and sodomised small boys, Amir was called on to right the wrongs of the past at the risk of his own life.
‘The Kite Runner’ makes the audience begin to understand the tragedy that is Afghanistan . That Paramount Pictures could make such a compelling film and still fail to understand Afghan culture and history to the extent that they risked the lives of the young Afghan actors has truly disturbing resonances.
Patricia McLoughlin
Fri, 02/08/2008 - 10:11 — Tricia