★★★
“Three into one won’t go”
There’a a good film in here. Actually, there may be as many as three good films in here. But the way in which they are melded together, manages to rob a good chunk of the power and impact from all of them. We begin by following Mathilde H (Bercot), a war journalist clearly modelled on Marie Colvin, down to the eye-patch and traumatic experience in Homs, Syria – Mathilde lost her eye there, Marie was killed. She has just started the process of embedding herself in Kurdistan, covering the locals’ attempt to regain territory taken from them by ISIS. The second story is that of Bahar (Farahani), leader of a Kurdish women’s battalion, who was forced to flee her hometown, losing her son in the process. She has heard rumours he is being radicalized and trained as a child soldier in occupied territory, and will risk anything to liberate him.
But wait! There’s more. For Bahar was also captured by ISIS herself, and held as a sex-slave, until she managed to escape and make her way back across the front-line. Her subsequent recruitment into the military, gives her the chance to take revenge on her captors – both for herself and for the thousands of other women who weren’t so lucky as to regain their freedom. On their own, any of these stories would be fine. The problem is that Husson does a real dog’s dinner of assembling them into a single narrative, and the result weakens all of them. There’s a convoluted structure of flashbacks and side angles, to the point that Mathilde ends up serving little narrative purpose herself. It’s a pity, as in Farahani, the director has found a marvellous actress, worthy of playing the heroine. In particular, she has amazing eyes that are both luminous and expressive. She reminds me a bit of the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph.
Of the three stories, probably unsurprisingly, it’s the most action-oriented one which I liked best. Bahar and her fellow soldiers make their way into enemy territory through a tunnel. It’s mined, yet they have a captured ISIS soldier to guide them past the booby-traps… or will he? It’s almost painfully tense, and a stark reminder that in this kind of war, you can never truly relax, with potential death lurking around every corner. It also helps that Bahar carries herself in a way that seems legitimate and battle-hardened (a bit of a shame the film isn’t apparently interested in the details of how she went from being a wife and mother, to commanding troops on the front-line). But just when this is getting a full head of steam, we suddenly switch to an extended flashback of her time in captivity. This would have worked much better as a chronological narrative. Instead, it’s a fatal blunder from which the film sadly never recovers. Rather than surging towards a climax, it peters out in sadly predictable melodrama.
Dir: Eva Husson
Star: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zubeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi
a.k.a. Girls of the Sun