Ray Pride

Writer-producer-director-editor Siddiq Barmak's wrenching story of a young girl's humiliation under the Taliban is the first made-in-Afghanistan film since the U.S. invasion, and it bears notable resemblances to contemporary Iranian films, such as those by Mohsen Makhmalbaf ("Gabbeh," "Kandahar," and particularly the documentary "Afghan Alphabet," which has several parallel scenes and a fixation on one Afghan girl's face hidden beneath a succession of burqas). Makhmalbaf's company, The Makhmalbaf Film house, in fact, was instrumental in the production of this simple, touching yet deeply wounding horror film. Marina Golbahari, whom Barmak discovered on the street, has a feral quality about her striking features, like Natalie Portman as a street kid, and it's almost inevitable her ruse to pass as a boy in order to work and support her fatherless family will fail and she will be crushed. I'm torn about what to think of a movie like this, filled with beautiful images of terrible things, portraying the moment-to-moment certitude of religious zealots who invoke the word of God to justify each indignity visited upon the women of their society. In its depiction of a vulpine society of men who collude in the theft of a soul, "Osama" shows not just one society, but a world bent on its own destruction. 88m.

"Osama" opens Friday at Pipers Alley and outlying theaters.

(2004-02-18)

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