Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, 2003, Iran/France, 105 mins (subtitles)
Cast:
Agheleh Rezaie, Abdolgani Yousefrazi, Razi Mohebi
There is a country, a democratic country, where, it is said, any kid can grow up to be President. When Noqreh (Rezale), the idealistic heroine of At Five In The Afternoon, entertains the notion that she might become President of Afghanistan, she is ridiculed. "How can an Afghani woman become President in her burqa and with her children", asks one of her peers. America may have deposed the Taliban and the burqas may tentatively be coming off, but what takes their place? A Western-style democracy? The American Dream? Freedom? Or, maybe, as Janis Joplin once sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose".
Kabul lies in ruins. Crowds of refugees return to their homeland only to find that nothing remains but rubble and poverty. The elders blame the downfall of the country on the abandonment of tradition by its liberal youth, especially the women who no longer veil themselves. Noqreh's devout father (Yousefrazi), who turns his back as unveiled women pass in the street, is horrified by the blasphemy he sees. He believes his daughter attends a Koran-reading school where she intones holy texts by rote ("Man is the guardian of woman because God has created some superior to others"). However, when he is not looking, Noqreh slips off her burqa, dons a pair of white, high-heeled shoes and makes her way to the newly-opened secular school. Here, the young women argue that "a brave and intelligent girl can make her own decisions". They aspire to become teachers and doctors. They stage a mock election and play at moderate politics. But it is this very liberalism that drives her disillusioned father into the mountains in search of a final resting place in "a real Islamic city".
At Five In The Afternoon examines the divergent paths taken by Noqreh and her father: one towards the future, the other the past. In her chic high heels, which, like Dorothy's ruby slippers, open up a intangible array of possibilities, Noqreh takes her first hesitant steps towards the future. Her curious new freedom is presented as strange and bewildering: it is a make-believe freedom where the veils go back on after class and where democracy is merely theory. The refugees do not care whether the President is a man or a woman; even the French peacekeeping soldier, whose job it is to uphold the ideals of democracy, can't tell her why the people of France voted for President Chirac. Only a refugee poet (Mohebi) can reveal something about freedom of thought, in the form of a Lorca poem which Noqreh learns by heart, instead of the brow-beaten, traditional holy texts. But while Noqreh has her unveiled photograph taken for the mock election campaign, her father's world is shaken by his new refugee neighbours who listen to profane music and post photographs of unveiled women on his walls. As the daughter discovers democracy for herself, her father's world is invaded by the very symbols of that democracy.
The brilliance of 24-year old Samira Makhmalbaf's film lies in its poetic evocation of the birth of a new world in the rocky debris of the old one. Neither demonising the old nor idolising the new, Makhmalbaf paints a brave human tapestry of hope and despair. A mother washes her dying baby in the warm light of a gently flickering fire; a father finds solace in talking to his donkey, silhouetted against the ruined city on the horizon. The final sequence in the wilderness is desperately bleak, but as Noqreh passes into the distance intoning her Lorca, we are reminded that there is perhaps still hope.
The non-professional actors and actresses tell the stories of their characters as if the stories were their own. One girl describes how her family was killed by the Taliban and how she was whipped as she went for food. This may be the actress' own true story, and as she tells it her remarkable restraint almost gives way with the welling of her eyes and cracking of her voice - not like an actress, like a human who has known suffering. These players show more compassion than most of the $10-million-a-movie Hollywood A-list put together. This is truly democratic filmmaking.
Simon Gray
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