Even more potentially divisive in the rigidly caste-conscious Kabul is the fact that Hassan is an ethnic Hazara and a Shiite Muslim - both discriminated-against minority groups - while Amir and his family are Sunnis and members of the elite Pashtun community. ![]() ![]() As children back in Kabul, Amir (played in the long flashback that makes up the film's first half by Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) are inseparable, despite the fact that Hassan and his father (Nabi Tanha) are servants in Baba's large home. Now, years after Baba's death, Rahim's comment from halfway around the world cuts Amir to the quick: For 30 years, Amir has been haunted by the childhood betrayal of his closest companion, Hassan. Rahim, on the other hand, understood Amir's sensitivity and encouraged his childhood dream of becoming a writer - a profession Baba brushed off as idle storytelling. Amir's real father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), a wealthy Kabul businessman reduced to working in a California gas station after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was always distant and disapproving, and Amir grew up fearing that Baba blamed him for the death of his wife in childbirth. In many ways, Rahim was the dad Amir never had. "There is a way to be good again," Rahim tells him, somewhat enigmatically. Rahim, who has been living in Pakistan since the Taliban seized power, is close to death and calling to tell Amir it's time he return home. Just as novelist Amir Qidiri (Khalid Abdalla) receives copies of his new book, "A Season for Ashes," at the apartment he shares with his wife (Atossa Leoni), he also receives a phone call from Rahim Khan (Shaun Toub), his late father's friend from the old days in Afghanistan. Hampered by a dull leading performance, Marc Foster and screenwriter David Benioff's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's hugely popular novel skimps on the book's real value - Hosseini's recollection of a modern, progressive Afghanistan and its fate in the hands of foreign invaders and religious fanatics - in favor of bland melodrama and absurd dramatics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |