The Swallows of Kabul: one of best films of 2020

Mohsen, a former history teacher, and Zunaira, an artist, are young and in love.

The Swallows of Kabul (M)

Selected cinemas

★★★★½

The outstanding French animated movie The Swallows of Kabu l opens with sound: a busy street, car horns honking, children laughing, the scrape of a shovel digging a hole.

We then see where we are: a war-ravaged, dilapidated Kabul, with buildings in rubble, men waving rifles and women in burqas. It is set in 1998 and Afghanistan is under Taliban control.

The swallows of the title flit through the 80-minute film. They, unlike the people, are free. We glimpse them from the window of a prison cell, or from behind the mesh of a chador. The first one we see, though, in the opening minutes, is shot down from the sky. The men wave their rifles and cheer as the bird hits the ground.

This prepares us for the next scene, one that underscores the fact this is an M-rated animated film. A condemned woman is taken from her prison cell, led into a public street and forced to kneel in a hollow in the ground. Men gather in front of her. Children climb on to a tank parked in the neighbourhood.

A man holding high a Koran declares the woman knew what she was doing. “Drunk from fornication she strayed from the Lord’s path.” The men in the crowd nod in agreement.

Then they pick up stones and stone the woman to death. It is a brutal scene, even in animated form, that is reminiscent of the opening pages of Christos Tsiolkas’s most recent novel, Damascus. Even the children throw stones, and laugh.

The last stone is thrown by a young man who will become one of the four main characters in the movie: Mohsen (Swann Arlaud).

He may throw it reluctantly but the action makes him complicit in the woman’s murder. Also complicit is another main character, the prison guard Atiq (Simon Abkarian), a former soldier who fought the Soviets.

This movie, based on the 2002 novel of the same name, is co-­directed by French actress and director Zabou Breitman and French cartoonist and animator Elea Gobe Mevellec. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

Mevellec, in her film debut, is in charge of the animation. She uses a 2D watercolour effect that suits this bleak account of ­repression, and resistance, under sharia law. The colours are muted, even austere: mainly browns and greys.

Some scenes, such as Mohsen walking through the ruined and closed Kabul University, with torn books and bullet shells on the floor of a lecture room, look real. When we see vibrant colour, it is the blue of the burqas that all women must wear and the red of the blood that seeps from them.

The two other main characters are Zunaira (Zita Hanrot), Mohsen’s beautiful, free-spirited wife, and Mussarat (Hiam Abbass), Atiq’s terminally ill wife. The two couples do not know each other, but their lives soon intersect in a way that will change each one of the four forever.

Atiq is the most important character in the film.

Mohsen, a former history teacher, and Zunaira, an artist, are young and in love. Zunaira imagines the life they will return to one day: teaching, drawing, seeing “terrible” films, listening to loud music, eating ice cream and kissing in the street. There’s a neat flashback moment to the now-bombed out cinema that shows such a life was possible in the past.

Atiq rarely speaks. He is muted by his lot. His wife is dying and he is in charge of women condemned to die. “I can’t even imagine my own misery,’’ he says. There is a telling scene where he sits in a cafe with his oldest friend, seeking advice. The friend fingers his prayer beads and tells him, warns him, “No man ever owes anything to a woman.”

When Mohsen and Zunaira decide to visit what used to be their favourite bookstore, also ruined and closed, she has to wear a burqa and chador, the “shameful shroud”, as she calls it. Her husband reminds her that they have to “fight from within”. Her reply is a spark of humour in the dark: “You don’t have to wear it.”

In the streets, covered up, we see the world through the chador. It’s a confronting switch of the point of view. The inspiration for this was the 2002 song Burka Blue performed by the anonymous all-female Burka Band from Kabul. The blue colour of their burqas, worn in this case to protect their identity, and as a protest, is also used in the movie.

The directors filmed the script with all the actors in studio in costume. So if the scene called for a burqa, the actor wore one. There’s no blue screen here. The closeness of the voice actors to the lives of the characters comes through in their powerful ­performances.

That trip to the old bookstore does not go well. But it’s what happens afterwards, when Mohsen confesses to his wife that he was one of the stone throwers, that leads to an unexpected and dramatic shift, one that makes Atiq the most important character in the film.

There’s an apposite backstory to the novel on which the movie is based. It was written, in French (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul), by Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulesshoul. To avoid military censorship, he wrote it, and a handful of earlier novels, under his wife’s name, Yasmina Khadra.

The author revealed his true identity only in 2001, after leaving the army and Algeria and moving to France. The screen adaptation, by Breitman, Sebastien Tavel and Patricia Mortagne, is broadly faithful to the novel. There are some plot changes and perhaps Mussarat is not as finely detailed, emotionally speaking.

The overall result, though, is the best animated film I have seen since The Red Turtle, the Dutch-Japanese feature from 2016, which was nominated for an Oscar, and the Japanese war drama In This Corner of the World from the same year.

It is one of the best films I have seen this year, full stop. It’s about whether to stay and fight or flee and be free, like a swallow.

There’s a moment when Zunaira, angry with her husband, continues to wear a chador at home. He asks her to take it off. “Your face is my only sun.” She looks at him, through the mesh, and says, “No sun can resist the night.”