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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 7, 2002
Raising the Afghan veil
Kandahar (Not rated, probably PG-13) (86 min.) -- Mohsen Makhmalbaf's movie didn't get much attention until after Sept. 11, when the city of its title became a target for U.S. military forces. Now the film is an important document, sketchy as it is, of an oppressive culture that postattack retaliation has rendered moot.
The word "Taliban" isn't mentioned in subtitles (though perhaps in the film's Farsi language), but viewers recognize that group's imprint on this fictional drama based on Makhmalbaf's observations traveling in Afghanistan. Kandahar made its debut at last fall's Toronto Film Festival, with two screenings coincidentally wrapped around Sept. 11. This is a glimpse of the physical and emotional wreckage Taliban followers left behind when they headed for the hills.
The plot, such as it is, focuses on Nafas (Niloufar Pazira), an Afghan working as a journalist in Canada. Nafas receives a letter from her sister in Kandahar who pledges to commit suicide during the next solar eclipse. Nafas has three days to reach the city and stop her, no easy task for a woman in her situation.
Makhmalbaf uses this deadline structure and Nafas' professional instincts to link eye-opening episodes of life under Taliban rule. The movie has a quasidocumentary feel, neglecting any narrative flow for minutes at a time to make sure we see everything the filmmaker deems necessary.
We witness children using rag dolls as tools to learn about dodging landmines. We see the mangled bodies of citizens who didn't dodge well enough. The film's most memorable scene features amputees hobbling toward prosthetic legs being dropped by parachute; get them while you can because it may be a yearlong wait for another chance. Most of all, we see a society where women are covered in burqas and cower before males oppressing them in the name of religion. There is a constant sense of danger simply because of gender.
Nafas records her trip on a tape recorder -- "my black box" -- in case she doesn't survive, so much of the dialogue in this French-Iranian production is spoken in English. Makhmalbaf couldn't have known during production how interesting English-speaking audiences would find this material.
The film's history took an interesting twist when one of its co-stars, Hassan Tantai, was recognized as a fugitive from justice, accused of murdering an anti-Ayatollah Khomeini dissident in Maryland 22 years ago. Several identities later, Tantai fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Makhmalbaf contends that he didn't know the actor's past when hiring for the role of a sympathetic doctor assisting Nafas.
Tantai delivers the film's only genuine performance, playing a hesitantly kind African-American doctor doing charity work in Afghanistan. His introduction to Nafas is a physical examination that, in accordance with Muslim values, is conducted through a sheet with a silver-dollar-size hole cut out for modesty's sake. It's one of several revelations in Kandahar about a culture we didn't have much time for before. A
Lantana (R) (121 min.) -- Australian Ray Lawrence is the latest filmmaker to proclaim professional admiration for Robert Altman, incorporating the master's signature -- or an expert counterfeiter like Paul Thomas Anderson's -- into Lantana. This brooding multicharacter study operates on the sturdy cinematic principle that everyone is connected to someone else, even strangers, in ways that can shape or shatter lives.
The hub of this intimate spinning wheel is Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), a powder-keg cop introduced while he's cheating on his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong). Leon is a tragedy waiting to happen, sabotaging his life with bad judgment unless those chest pains end it first. Sonja is steady but suspicious, leading her to therapist Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey) for advice.
Valerie's emotional baggage arrives slowly as Lawrence and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (basing the script on his stage play Speaking in Tongues) deftly drop clues for the audience. Valerie's daughter was murdered a few years before, and she wrote a book about the situation, a career-turner that still doesn't sit well with her husband, John Knox (Geoffrey Rush). Another of Valerie's clients is a gay man (Peter Phelps) with a married lover who the psychiatrist believes is John. Everyone in Lantana doesn't know something important about someone else.
Contrasting the Zats' middle-class woes and the affluent tragedy of Valerie and John is a financially struggling, emotionally secure couple (Vince Colosimo, Rachael Blake) who mingle with the others in Bovell's random coincidences. Class is a constant issue in Lantana with an underlying message that money can't buy happiness.
Lantana is named for a dense, prickly plant, an apt metaphor for the emotional tangles involved. The film begins with Mandy Walker's camera pushing through a field of lantana until it spies a corpse, like the severed ear kicking off Blue Velvet. We can't identify the body, but, even if the victim's identity is guessed, the killer and his/her motivation won't be pegged for a while.
Lawrence's film is a whodunit, but more adept at wondering why these people are doing this to themselves. LaPaglia (an Aussie despite his usual New York accents) has the most volatile character, unleashing Leon's personal and professional frustrations in a wide arc, from viciously bullying a jogger who bumped him to an embarrassed reluctance to join Sonja in a dance class. It's a bold performance that earned one of the film's eight Australian Film Institute awards.
Each actor has combustible material to burn. Hershey (The Stunt Man, The Portrait of a Lady) makes one of her infrequent appearances that always impress. Her scenes with Rush contain a raw honesty beneath their character's respectable poses. Armstrong is a quieter force, poising Sonja on the brink of a new life or the same old thing. Even the smallest roles carry telling moments as Lantana rambles toward solving a case that gradually becomes less important.
The screenplay and Lawrence's somber style wallow in some angst more than necessary, but with actors working at this level it's a minor problem. As in Monster's Ball, the erotic passages are more pathetic than titillating because of the desperation under the skin. Lantana is an ambitious dive into emotional depths that fascinates while it also repulses, a lovely ugliness haunting a viewer for days afterward. A-