Title : We should learn and grow towards good
Review :
Maybe this movie was too pretty too look at, considering background events which were happening at the time. While the world around these characters seems to have forgotten that beauty exists, there is a chance to see in ''Osama''that beauty exists and we can, perhaps must, learn about it.
The way the time is used, that is to say the pacing, in this movie shows that what we are seeing is not entirely film nor real flesh nor costume. Many of the colors and choices of photographic content are deliberate. Then time passes before our eyes as a result of what we have seen on display.
Just as food takes time to obtain, to store, to prepare, to consume, and to be used by the body -- so are the images in the mind sometimes.
Stories, even bedtimes stories, can take generations to become part of us. When the boys discover a girl in their school, there can be ''ablution'' somehow -- but it is a new ''story'' (to find a girl instead of a boy) and, therefore a difficult one for us. Can we climb a tree ? Yes. Might we need help to get from there back down to earth ? Yes.
So I was left not just with the many moving images and beauties that the other reviewers referred to. I will think about this for a long time. One image we are shown is the food store. The movie maker did not forget that there are things which take away the sustenance in life. But this is not the job of a film maker.
To make motion pictures means to give the ''dollar'' of sustenance as in the first scene where Espandi is given money by a film maker. For the viewer of a motion picture it is not a real dollar, sure. But not just a ''story dollar'' either, with no value.
Even an old tree, bare of leaves, can show us there is a chance to learn and a chance to live, at least an old tree does so in this film. There is much to say in goodness about this film, but maybe this should be left for each who have seen and heard to keep.
Me ? I was left wondering what happened to the main character's mother and grandmother. She shouts for her mother a number of times near end of the film, but the audience doesn't get to see her mother again. There is a brief trial scene. We will not be seeing the rest of Osama's life again as part of the film, either.
Perhaps we are being warned that, like the boys whose behavior concerning the question of Osama's being a boy or being a girl -- our own lives would be sure to bring hard fruits unless we take care to apply the many ablutions (school, religion, justice, the passage of time) of life in the right ways. The boys at the school become more and more questioning, and the time that passes in the movie becomes thicker and thicker with almost a foggy/smokey ''wrong'' quality -- we almost feel the film maker has made a mistake.
But even though the masquerade of being a boy is wrongful in the culture of the people that are being filmed, if we learn only to chase around and around about such questions, too much wrong will come from it -- it cannot be kept in a school or even in a story if we ''get in too deep''. The boys persist in questioning and chasing Osama and this becomes almost boring. Some things hold up only so far -- in school, in stories, even in films and even though some things are only a masquerade.
So when ''Osama'' is being prepared for her wedding, many of the older women also tell her ''stories'' -- not stories like her grandmother had told her, but real life stories. Hard stories, but these women, while they experience hardships -- tell the stories, I believe, because there will now be a new phase for the main character. Time will pass. The stories they have to tell cannot change, but years will still pass along.
The mystery of what happened to her mother and grandmother (her past) is connected somehow in my mind with the question of what will be her future (symbolized, perhaps, by the washing or ablutions of the Mullah).
The movie ends with the presence of the Mullah and the ablutions to remind us that things are best when set right. Osama is not a boy, but a girl. But for changing the beautiful story (such as the one her grandmother told her which made boys' being girls and girls' being boys seem good or beautiful or dreamy) -- is this part of why the Mullah makes the ablution and hot bath at the end ? For example : we can not be sure to reach God by climbing a tree.
And, just because all creatures around us seem to follow along the path that nature intended, that does not ensure that their actions will bring beauty. The rest of the people at the school were real boys; Osama was not. But the many boys, even though they were not the transgressors to the rules of boy/girl -- they became bogged down and were not able to actually solve the very problem they thought they were confronted with, only to chase around in circles. In view of the ''after school'' behavior of all the boys, which was the ''real'' Osama ?
The boys could only try to look and discover -- once they made their discovery, they themselves could not be ones to handle it, the authorities at the school and even judicial authority had to step in -- so, in retrospect, their actions seemed no good BEFORE and after they found Osama was a girl. All the energy they put into the discovery did them no good.
It is only after wisdom and, perhaps in some generations, after long life, that ablutions take another meaning. If we change the things that God had placed in our path by playing our hand, perhaps we need to be washed clean for that -- and perhaps you'd have to be a Mullah to make the ablutions. Changes can and do come true in real life. Some things are mystery. Some things are not.
But never the less, life must be beautiful and sometimes it takes an additional, outside pair of eyes to make us see that fact, whether it is a film maker or an elderly, perhaps, secretively wise Mullah.
If we have forgotten the beauty in all life, and in the troubled world, we all must at times give up all the beauty (because that is real). Sad, but true in our own lives.
And it will hurt us when we find ''a girl in boy's clothing'' -- that is to say, when we catch a glimpse of the realities we SHOULD be living -- when do we see that there actually is beauty to life? Sometimes it may be only after tears have been shed. Like the tears in the film shed by Osama.
For such a one-track film with so many simple images there certainly is a strong, haunting after taste.
Best wishes for all,
Jerry in Pennsylvania
ps -- I rented this on DVD at the movie store. I wonder how these pictures look on the big screen. I guess you were really affected in the theaters by some of the colors and events.
