Foreign Policy Blogs

The Black Tulip: On Truth and Narrative Fiction in One Piece of Afghan Cinema

Ever since I watched the Ridley Scott film “Gladiator” ten years ago, and winced at the public and private dissembling that was the meat of that film, I’ve always toed a somewhat cautionary line between freedom of expression–as something more than a principle– and responsible art-making.   At issue: when does a plausible experience ring false in a piece of art?  The recent news about the American financed Afghan, shot and situated, film “The Black Tulip” reads as ringing false in just the way, that even respecting freedom of expression, the house of cards does not hold up–though I admit I have not seen this film.

The New York Times reports that audiences have snickered and giggled through some of the most emotionally sensitive passages in the film.

“Some of the film’s most dramatic moments involved things never before seen on Afghan screens — let alone on Afghan streets — like public kissing, touching between members of the opposite sex and women swearing. The reaction of the audience ranged from titters through snickers to peals of laughter, which can also be a way of expressing embarrassment.”

Moreover:

“Afterward, Shaheen Darai, an Afghan media company employee, challenged a scene showing high-ranking coalition officers, an American colonel and some NATOcolleagues hanging out in the cafe along with assorted Taliban desperadoes.”

“The filmmakers were not very familiar with Afghanistan, or its culture and tradition,” he said. “None of that would ever happen here.” Neither Taliban nor uniformed coalition soldiers are ever seen in Kabul cafes, let alone drink alcohol in them.”

I want to ask: are the Afghan people insensitive to the subject matter, that at least some people have put out such a pointed critique?  Or is it instead that the film is being insensitive to the experience of the Afghan people? (Is it possible I ask, you, my reader, as a corollary, to critique something someone has not seen?  I say it is eminently possible: people criticize American this, that and the other without first stepping foot on American soil, without first dealing with the context in which that good is situated.  The point here is, individuals are free to criticize and critique a good based on its perceived consequences; it is on those grounds that many critics point to America’s faults, the faults of some of its cultural exports; it is on those grounds that I critique the film.)

Go back to Gladiator, released in 2000 to think through what I mean. Commodus, the young Emperor, in reality reigned in Rome for an age and more and is known to have been a competent chief executive.  He was not some power hungry neurotic, more inclined to weep over daddy’s love than to make measured moves.  In reality, Marcus Aurelius was not as beloved as he is shown to be.  Maximus could not been offered Rome by the ailing Emperor without having run through a well-thrashed argument, through swords and plow-shares, on his capabilities as a leader. He surely would not have survived the real trials that may or may not have been set for him.

Nevertheless, compelling narrative can stand against the explored and plumbed truth. And in that circumstance, one decides whether one favors the narrative or the truth; that decision will have to be based on whether the project at large was concerned with the truth or with narrative.   A Hollywood action filmed designed to burst open the box-office coffers can take historical narrative license.  However a film based on the real experiences of real people, recently lived and loved, can be suspect when the truth falls to fiction.  Consider the uproar that beat about the otherwise excellent film, “The Hurt Locker.”

So consider  the new film, The Black Tulip, a story of one woman’s struggle against the Taliban’s heady-swarming illiberalism.  When she starts a Bohemian cafe, the Taliban threaten her family with assassination.

The problem as the New York Times reports:

“This was wrong, this was not good,” said Hamid Mohammed, a tailor. He was shocked at something he said he had never seen in his life, a young man kissing a woman full on the face mask of her head-to-toe, baby blue burqa. (Burqas have a mesh grill over the eyes, but no mouth opening.) He guffawed at the recollection, then apologized for the outburst.”

Codes of conduct  live and are maintained out and about; in Afghanistan, just like in other conservative places, those codes are carried into distant places and times for fear of public shame.  Therefore, as it is reported in the Times, it is not likely that even individuals fictionalized and projected onto screens would act in ways that sets that apart from their lot, collective, social, liberal.

The film fictionalizes and rings false its attempt at internal coherence.   A man who had intended to slap around Vito Corleone would not be long for this world. Knowing this, whatever his righteous complaint against the Corleone family, he would not reach out his hand in anger.  In a realistic account of life in Kabul, no liberal, Bohemian man would plant a kiss on a woman’s veiled lips: that cinematic phrasing seems perfunctory and geared toward the romantic or worse, sensationalistic. This is internal coherence, muddled to the point of incoherence.

Though the film is the only film to have been released in Afghanistan, nevertheless its provenance remains ever more suspect. The Afghan born, though American raised director, took over the leading role under circumstances that she claims were regretfully terrible.  She claims a Pakistan actress was maimed by the Taliban by having her feet cut-off.  So far, there seems little proof on the matter.  The move, indeed, seems geared, intentionally and otherwise, to generate interest: public relations on stilts.  Ambiguity is the coin for this exchange.  This makes for interesting copy, though not an interesting film.

Now the recent news brings stories of overt corruption in the elections in Afghanistan, a pock mark on the much esteemed honor and trials of the Afghan people.  A film that purports to show some shade of that honor, some of those trial had best be honest with its subject matter. Otherwise, it risk more than snickers.  It risks condemnation.

 

Author

Faheem Haider

Faheem Haider is a political analyst, writer and artist. He holds advanced research degrees in political economy, political theory and the political economy of development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and New York University. He also studied political psychology at Columbia University. During long stints away from his beloved Washington Square Park, he studied peace and conflict resolution and French history and European politics at the American University in Washington DC and the University of Paris, respectively.

Faheem has research expertise in democratic theory and the political economy of democracy in South Asia. In whatever time he has to spare, Faheem paints, writes, and edits his own blog on the photographic image and its relationship to the political narrative of fascist, liberal and progressivist art.

That work and associated writing can be found at the following link: http://blackandwhiteandthings.wordpress.com