Kabul’s kite, curious mixtures of lucidity and sensitiveness (critic)

Between lucidity and sentimentality, Marc Forster’s film is not as strong as the novel by Afghan Khaled Hosseini.

At the beginning of 2008, the editors of First and Fluctuate were a little taken aback by this adaptation of Kabul’s kiteto review this evening on Arte, as well as in replay. Here is why.

By adapting the novel by Afghan Khaled Hosseini (published in 2003), Marc Forster (Neverland, Quantum of Solace) Choose to confront your camera with geopolitical tragedies. The result is a curious mixture of lucidity and sensitiveness.

These Stubbing have everything a disconcerting project: the American director of Neverland and Harold Crick’s incredible fate which recreates the Kabul of the 1970s, with Egyptian, Afghans and Iranian comedians, dialogues in Dari (the Afghan language) and a shooting in popular China. All funded by Hollywood, you could fear big hooves.

This suspicion fades up fairly quickly, faced with the humility of the gaze on the life of the Kabul “from the front” (before the invasion of the Soviets of 1979, before the reign of the Taliban and before the post-0 September) war). If we tend to associate this period with a peaceful golden age, Marc Forster seizes it as a neutral frame, rather soothing, but not devoid of secret pain. Helped by brilliant actors, the story takes the time to capture an original perfume, that of a childhood that we know threatened by future political tragedies.

However, the film does not completely avoid the big strings. By emphasizing the guilt of a childhood act, fiction sometimes derives towards melodrama and runs the risk of a certain formatting. But this feeling is coupled with real dread in the face of the drought of the sequences of “Back to Afghanistan Taliban”. The staging, avoiding firefighter effects, coldly portrays the violence of fanaticism and injustices made to women (terrible scene of public stoning).

Marc Forster obviously shoots on the sensitive rope when America suddenly presents itself as an idyllic reception land. Sirupy music bursts, aseptizing the conclusion. But this musical exaggeration is also an ironic distance, as if this Hollywood aesthetic was aware of being Too Much. By showing too much sunshine of the Californian sequences, Kabul’s kittens Also draw attention to the too much confidentiality that American cinema has long reigned over dramas in the outside world.