By Sandra Hall and reviewer
Khaled Hosseini's much loved novel The Kite Runner takes you to the Kabul of 30 years ago - a place that was soon to vanish, becoming as unreachable as Pompeii and Atlantis.
Fortunately for 12-year-old Amir, he doesn't know this. The Russian invasion of his country is still four years away. And as the son of a prosperous member of the city's liberal intelligentsia, he leads an easy, cosseted life.
His father's house is regarded by many as the prettiest in the city and Amir and his friend, Hassan, the son of the family's servant, rejoice in all the pleasures of childhood. They go to movies, have picnics in the park and compete in the winter kite-flying tournament that fills the skies above Kabul with bobbing squares of colour.
Needless to say, in filming The Kite Runner the director, Marc Forster, didn't try to re-create this long-gone world in present-day, post-Taliban Kabul. But he didn't resort to mocking it up in Europe or California, either. He got close to Afghanistan, finding what he wanted in two of the Silk Road cities of western China. He also had most of his Afghan characters speak in their own language.
On one level, such an approach to the novel comes as no surprise. Its millions of readers would not have liked being cheated of its vibrant particularities. Yet its status as an international bestseller could easily have enticed the film's producers into going the other way and casting big-name actors, shooting wholly in English and launching the film into the commercial mainstream.
Happily, they didn't and the result is an impeccable adaptation - a dull phrase for an experience as rich as this one.
If you love film, you exult in its ability to put you inside other people's lives. It doesn't always fulfil this promise for reasons that usually show up soon after you've settled into your seat. It can take no more than a minute for you to tell whether or not you're going to be swept into the magic circle that connects you with those larger-than-life figures up on screen. And here, it's even less. You're immediately hooked by the realisation that you're about to be taken on an adventure of the classic kind.
For when we meet Amir, he's about to be uprooted from all that's familiar and comfortable and tested in ways previously unimaginable. It's the adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla) I'm talking about as the story is framed in flashback, beginning in 2001 in San Francisco. Here in the city where Amir has lived since the Russian invasion shattered his old life, he and his wife, Soraya (Atossa Leoni), are looking forward to the publication of his first novel when he receives a call from Pakistan. It's from an old friend of his father's with news that will send Amir back to Kabul to atone for an act of cowardice that has haunted him for 20 years.
But first comes the story of 12-year-old Amir's friendship with Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), whom he both loves and resents. The reasons for this ambivalence lie with Amir's father (Homayoun Ershadi), a straight-talking, independent-minded sophisticate who sometimes gives the impression he prefers brave, loyal little Hassan to Amir himself.
To play Amir and Hassan, Forster found two Afghan schoolboys, who inhabit these characters with such unaffected naturalism that you feel as if you are eavesdropping on them. Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada's Hassan has a cheeky face allied with a preternatural poise, which seems to spring directly from the sweetness of his nature. Zekeria Ebrahimi's Amir, who's good-looking and slightly withdrawn, often regards him quizzically - as if genuinely baffled as to how anyone can be so good. The boys' friendship is at the heart of the story but it is brought to an abrupt and premature end by Amir's failure to come to Hassan's aid when he needs him most. This betrayal dictates the course events will take 26 years later in the Kabul of the Taliban.
Hosseini had more than 300 pages in which to encompass all this. Benioff's screenplay covers it in just over two hours and, not surprisingly, the denouement, for all its racking tension, seems hurried and underdone. But it's a small thing in a film which throbs with life and hope, together with a piercing awareness of the ways in which the fortunes of East and West are tightly intertwined.