An Afghan rom-com interrupted by the Taliban
Photo: trigon-film, No Good Men (showing at the BFI London Film Festival)
Daniel Nelson
“A feel-good story in a feel-bad place.” That’s what the trailer for No Good Men says.
It’s a smarty-pants line for a rom-com that, unusually and bravely, is set in Kabul as the Taliban shoots its way back into power.
Director Shahrbanoo Sadat (born in Iran, lived in Afghanistan, now resides in Germany) has pulled off a coup of her own by making such a feisty, flashy, witty, engaging drama. A couple of online commentators have dismissed it as light entertainment, and a funder even wrote to tell her it was inappropriate to support a rom-com while Afghanistan was in such a dire political situation.
She was incensed. This film, she thought, is my way of coming from a country at war and expressing my unprocessed social and political traumas.
She stuck the letter on her fridge door, which is what the film’s heroine, 30-year-old Naru, would have done.
Naru is a camera operator in a TV news station who says what she thinks, and what she thinks is that Afghan men are sexist and hopeless in every respect. Yes, even her dad, in the way he treated her mother in the past, and her brothers. She can’t divorce her incompetent, hapless husband because she would probably lose custody of her young son.
She’s tucked safely away in “women’s programmes”, denied any opportunities to break out until a news cameraman is suddenly unavailable for an urgent political interview, and the hard-nosed, experienced, 50-year-old news correspondent, Qodrat, grudgingly takes her along.
She’s unfazed and efficient, but the Taliban spokesperson being interviewed suddenly declares that he will not be in a room with an uncovered woman and storms off, which she points out maybe because he didn’t like the tough questions being put to him.
On the way back to the office, Qodrat, disappointed that his Important Political Interview has gone awry, punishes her by ordering her out of the car and telling her to do a vox pop about Valentine’s Day.
Her revealing and sadly funny interviews about love with women in the market are an instant hit with colleagues, and even the gruff Qodrat has to apologise for his behaviour and ask for her help on an assignment. It’s a meet-cute moment in the midst of Taliban bombing and attacks and threats to the TV station, as well as angry attempts by her no-hoper ex-husband to force his way back into her life.
Naru is feisty, smart and independent but she is drawn to Qodrat. He’s clearly smitten with Naru, even if he can’t quite go along with her belligerence and refusal to keep quiet: in one incident she hassles two bemused policemen for failing to search her and her equipment. Each respects the other’s professional skills.
Then comes a personal revelation, and disaster strikes, twice. The course of true love never did run smooth, but it rarely runs into problems as severely as this potential affair.
The story unrolls with pace, excitement, humour and colour because this is no slow and sober documentary with a preachy message: director Sadat has made a vibrant fast-moving adventure with larger-than-life characters in a tougher-than-life culture.