In their adaption of Yasmina Kadra’s novel The Swallows of Kabul (2002), director/actress Zabou Breitman and animator Eléa Gobbé Mévellec have pulled each other into new territory: the former had never worked in animation and the latter had never worked on a feature film. Mixing their areas of expertise they filmed their actors performing scenes in full, costumed takes and then turned the frames into graphics which look hand-painted, delicately watercoloured and outlined with bold ink strokes. The style suits the substance. Swallows, set during the Taliban’s five year regime, grapples with the ability to live meaningfully when self-expression is never without fear. Art, in all forms, has been forbidden. The film concentrates on two couples: Mohsen and Zunaira, and Atiq and Musarrat. The former are younger, and in search of joy while the latter, older and more cynical, try to live with the near certainty that joy cannot be found.
Mohsen and Zunaira do not cling to the fragments of their liberated lives as much as they carry them gently in their pockets. Mohsen, a historian, strolls through his former university and stares at the bullet shells that litter its rooms. (In one moment of heavy-handed symbolism, he dwells on two golden casings resting on an open text book). Meanwhile Zunaira, a painter, disengages with her oppressive community so entirely that she does not even own the necessary burqa that would allow her to venture outside. Her daily routine consists of transgressions against the Taliban – painting on the walls of their flat, listening to music – which send women scuttling past her window which leaks bass, for fear of mere association. In spite of restrictions, Mohsen and Zunaira retain some level of passion: Mohsen for Zunaira, and Zunaira for Mohsen and their future. She is fierce in her belief that the latter still exists unchanged from its original conception. “One must live,” she tells Mohsen, eyes burning as much as it is possible for sketched eyes to burn.
And Mohsen does, for Zunaira, but the impoverishment of education outside of propaganda, the bursts of gunfire, and the daily cries of the wretched outside the Taliban-occupied hospital, change him as they change Kabul. After visiting the wreckage of his own university, he happens upon – or is drawn to – the public stoning of a prostitute. We can’t see the woman’s face underneath her burqa, but we hear her laboured breathing. What we do see is the entire stoning, which is perhaps only possible for an audience to bear because it is drawn. Mohsen watches the crowd toss rocks at the woman before picking up the last stone in the pile and throwing it himself. Is he performing, caught up in the spectacle? Does he at all believe that this woman deserves to “die as she lived” – in disgrace – as the man announcing her execution has proclaimed? Or is he transferring his frustration, expressing misery through violence for which he knows there will be no societal consequence? We don’t know because Mohsen doesn’t know. Engaging with institutionalised, gendered violence, even without conviction, still stains. Later, as Zunaira washes Mohsen’s feet, he imagines the water turning to blood.
If Mohsen and Zunaira show us the hardships of more traditional resistance, Atiq and Musarrat show us the agony of compliance. Tender moments do not exist for Atiq, a prison guard, and his terminally ill wife Musarrat, who is bothered far less by her physical pain than the spiritual pain of failing to make Atiq happy and therefore failing to “fulfill her duties as a wife”, as she tells him miserably. Musarrat’s devotion is a foil for Zunaira’s commitment to retaining her autonomy: hert womanhood and personhood pivot on her domestic abilities, as the Taliban dictates they should. Swallows as a film reduces Musarrat to despondent patheticisms. Khadra’s novel contextualises Musarrat’s insistence on doing housework by making clear that this is her way of retaining her dignity. The film strips this away. By concentrating on her subservience, now seemingly only ideological, the film opts for a portrayal which works dramatically but one-dimensionally. One evening, she ignores Atiq’s inquiry about her pain by pointing out that she cooked and tidied up. Atiq’s friends, too, scold him for his emotional reaction to her. “No man owes anything to a woman,” they tell him, and the distance between them, knotted with duty, remains.
In the end, what Breitman and Mévellec tell us is that there is no way to exist undamaged under this kind of oppression, and that extends to the men who “benefit” from it and those, like Zunaira, who try to live outside of it. Like Mohsen, she is led to an act that would be unbelievable were it not for this and the film’s consistent use of hypersymbolism. When Zunaira is sent to Atiq’s prison to await execution he falls in love with her at first sight. We get the sense that we’re meant to cheer Atiq on, but there’s something diminishing about the fact that his protective impulse comes from a single look, although his motivation later becomes less flimsy. The film’s more interesting celebration, though, is that of Musarrat’s final sacrifice for Atiq. She switches places with Zunaira and takes the bullet meant for her. The crowd of covered women who are watching suddenly scatter and turn into swallows flying, free, through the air. This is beautiful, but I wonder about the message. The final image of female liberation in the film follows a sacrifice ultimately made for the sake of a man and his attraction to another woman.
Bessie Rubenstein studies film in New York
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