Surviving in Afghanistan
Land Mines, A Love Story, dir.
Dennis O’Rourke. The Afghan woman, mysterious behind her ice-blue burka, suspended somewhere between pathos and allure, is one of the sharpest images of the 21st century. That delphinium blue, still against a background of war and carnage, has drawn photographers in their thousands. Some of them may have read Edward Said’s Orientalism, may even have absorbed its cautions against romanticising the exotic. But the blue is irresistible.
Dennis O’Rourke, by his own account, was caught by that blue as he drove through Kabul’s central bazaar soon after the American bombing. But he saw something else as well: a plastic prosthetic leg sticking out from the enveloping material.
It’s characteristic of O’Rourke’s risky documentary style that he should seize the moment and find his film in that chance encounter. The veil is raised, and we meet Habiba, 19, Tajik, articulate, resilient and yet achingly innocent. She is the pivot on which the film turns.
Habiba lost her leg a decade or so earlier—land mines have a long history in Afghanistan. Her husband Shah, a cobbler, is similarly maimed. They have children, and another one coming. The film documents their efforts to survive. In between scenes of Habiba begging (Shah is shamed by his wife’s enterprise) and Shah trying for a social service pittance, O’Rourke splices a short history of land mining, using sources that include grainy Russian archival footage of metal disks and shredded flesh with cutaways to the digital shimmer of George W. Bush explaining how heartfelt is American compassion, and an earnest US general explaining how unfortunate it is that air-dropped food parcels are the same colour as land mines.
But the film’s strength is the Afghan material: real people being themselves, on the street, at home, in classrooms where exuberant children learn by rote about small machines that may kill or dismember them, in clinics where the women who make the prostheses all limp. Habiba, with her hip-straining walk, is wonderful, whether primping shyly for a photograph or telling men in the bazaar that they should give her more in alms. The intercut land mine and political footage seems contrived by comparison—Errol Morris (The Fog of War) territory, and best left to him. O’Rourke’s art and best energies lie in enticing—or simply allowing—people to act out their own complexity in front of his intimate camera.
Morag Fraser
Hitching a ride