The Breadwinner (2017)
A headstrong young girl in Afghanistan disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family.
Director:
Nora TwomeyStars:
Language:
EnglishRelease Date:
17 November 2017 (USA) See more »Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
Color
Based on a children's novel by Deborah Ellis and executive produced by
Angelina Jolie, Nora Twomey's animated feature centers on a young Afghan
girl's resilience in the face of devastating circumstances.
Movies are filled with scrappy kids who weather tough situations, but Parvana, the 11-year-old Kabul resident at the center of The Breadwinner,
is a particularly memorable survivor. In a story that's as vibrant as
it is harrowing, the Afghan girl steps into the vacuum left by her
father's arrest and, disguising herself as a boy, ventures into the
Taliban-controlled city in order to keep her family fed.
In her first solo stint at the helm of a feature, Nora Twomey, who co-directed the dazzling Secret of Kells,
sugarcoats nothing about Parvana's story, even while layering it with a
touch of enchantment. She and screenwriter Anita Doron, adapting
Deborah Ellis' book, maintain the child's point of view in both strands
of the narrative: the brutal day-to-day challenges that Parvana faces
and the magic-tinged fable she spins to soothe and entertain her baby
brother.
The involvement of Angelina Jolie will certainly boost the profile of
the Ireland-Canada-Luxembourg co-production, which joins the ranks of
such hard-hitting animated features as Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis in its artful alchemy of personal particulars through the prism of political conflict.
Novelist Ellis based her Breadwinner series of books on
interviews she conducted with residents of an Afghan refugee camp in
Pakistan, and the filmmakers have taken similar care to ensure the
cultural accuracy of their adaptation, from the realistic backdrops to
the use of Afghan musicians and singers (recorded remotely) in the
affecting score by siblings Mychael and Jeff Danna.
The action unfolds in 2001, when Parvana (voiced with spirit and
intelligence by Saara Chaudry) regularly accompanies her father,
Nurullah (Ali Badshah), on his trips to the central market, where he
hawks miscellaneous items along with his letter-writing and -reading
skills. A former schoolteacher, he instills a sense of history in his
young daughter — specifically, the history of their country as the site
of countless incursions and occupations over the centuries. Parvana
sighs in boredom over the litany of invaders: Alexander the Great,
Genghis Khan and, in more recent years, the Soviets. But Afghan
political history takes on a terrible urgency for her when the city's
self-appointed moral guardians, the Taliban, cart the worldly Nurullah
to prison for questioning their restrictive edicts.
The apartment that Parvana shares with her broken-hearted mother,
Fattema (Laara Sadiq); argumentative older sister, Soraya (Shaista
Latif); and toddler brother, Zaki, becomes a kind of prison, too. Under
Taliban rule, women and girls can be out and about only in the company
of a male, and shopkeepers fearful of retribution won't sell Parvana
rice or any other household staples.
But once she cuts her hair short and dons the clothes of her deceased
older brother Sulayman (Noorin Gulamgaus) — whose story is gradually
revealed with minimal detail and maximum impact — Parvana navigates the
streets and markets with relative freedom. She finds a kindred spirit
and entrepreneurial partner in Shauzia (Soma Chhaya), another girl
passing as a boy. Together they sell tea and take on odd jobs. Plotting
her escape to the peaceful seaside, Shauzia alludes to a troubled home
life, and, as in their treatment of Sulayman, the screenplay and
direction convey volumes in just a few words and gestures.
Amid all the sorrow and struggle, there are moments of welcome humor,
too, particularly in the tale that Parvana, carrying on her absent
father's love of storytelling, tells Zaki. To set the
story-within-the-story apart from the main narrative's simple line-drawn
characters and naturalistic background renderings, Twomey adopts a
stylized cutout animation style. The tale of a child's courage against a
villainous Elephant King abounds in deep jewel tones and is punctuated
with circular and other symmetrical arrangements.
That the allegory's protagonist is a boy ties him to the daring of
Parvana and Shauzia as well as to the late Sulayman and the tot Zika, a
sweetly gurgling embodiment of joy and innocence. An expression of strength and creativity in
a world of constant danger, the story Parvana weaves gives shape to
hope while acknowledging seemingly insurmountable difficulties.
Through it all, Parvana never gives up on trying to see her
imprisoned father, if only to pass along the walking stick he's needed
since losing a leg in wartime. One of his illiterate customers, Razaq
(Kawa Ada), proves sympathetic and helpful, and the wordless moments he
shares with Parvana, as his own devastating losses come to light, are
among the most poignant in the film.
The threat of war and its bitter memories are everywhere; not long
after Parvana crosses a desert littered with abandoned military tanks,
the skies are darkened by new machines of destruction. Not unlike her
gutsy protagonist, Twomey moves through the charged landscape with
extraordinary agility. Combining gripping suspense with a quote from the
immortal Persian poet Rumi, she creates a stirring final sequence from
the rising chords of terror and resilience. Nothing is resolved,
exactly, but for a breathtaking instant, love resounds more powerfully
than any bomb ever could.
FINAL RATING: 8/10 for the genre and 7/10 overall. Nice and cute anime which shows what it means if you have nothing and how to survive every day with little things. Different and great at the same time because the movie shows what it really means to sell your body.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
