For Sitara Magazine
By Khalida Sarwari
When Antonio Ricci goes on a desperate search on the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sicca’s neo-realist masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief, your heart breaks for the man whose entire livelihood depends on the vehicle. The bicycle holds the promise of a job and future for a poor man struggling to survive in a country crippled with poverty after the end of World War II. Hana Makhmalbaf, the 19-year-old daughter of famed Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, adopts this neo-realist concept in Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, a film that tells a similarly complicated tale in simple fashion. Like De Sica, Makhmalbaf injects heartbreaking beauty into an ordinary object, which in the case of this film happens to be a notebook.
It’s a notebook that little Baktay (Nikbakht Noruz), a girl of maybe 5 or 6, pines for and spends an entire day trying to attain after having her interest piqued by Abbas (Abbas Alijome), the sweet-natured boy who lives in the cave next to the one she shares with her mother and infant sister. Setting out to prove to Abbas that she, too, is capable of reading a book and going to school, Baktay journeys atop the caves amid the ruined remnants of the statues of Buddhas and through the busy male-dominated marketplaces of Bamyan in search of a vendor that sells school supplies. Along the way, Baktay receives a lesson in business and trade, but also rejection and what it means to be a girl in a country infested with male chauvinism. For the little girl whose constant refrain throughout the film is “I have to buy a notebook… I’m late for school,” this is the most distressing of all lessons.
The final shot is perhaps the finest of the film. As Baktay and Abbas try to escape a band of junior Taliban boys who have been bullying them on numerous occasions throughout the day, Abbas decides to fool them by falling down and playing dead on the roadside. This tactic does the trick and the bullies run feverishly past him in full pursuit of Baktay. Abbas hastily gets up and calls after her, “Baktay, die and you’ll be free!” We never find out what happens next to either of the children as the film concludes in the same manner it initially began: a loud explosion. We are left to wonder: do Abbas and Baktay perish at the hands of the Taliban-in-training in the same way that the statues of Buddhas did at the hands of the real militants in March 2001?
Buddha is a respectable effort from Makhmalbaf, remarkable even, when taken into consideration that she was only 18 when she made the film. The challenging task has paid off for the young filmmaker, as the film was recently selected to be included in San Francisco’s International Asian-American Film Festival. Buddha also won the Glass Bear and Peace Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and the TVE Otra Mirada Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It isn’t a perfect film; a number of scenes are drawn-out and some of the points made are less than subtle. Still it is worth viewing if only to see the devastating image of the Buddhas of Bamyan “collapsing,” taking down with them centuries of Afghanistan’s rich and beautiful history.
