Breath-takingly desolate. Those are the two words that best decribe Kandehar. The landscape, the culture, the violence... The only things that could be described as lush are the colors of the burqas.
Nafas, the woman trying to reach her sister in Kandehar to prevent her suicide, repeatedly shrugs back her burqa to see what is happening, and to address those to whom she is speaking. The value of eye contact, of seeing the person to whom you are speaking is emphasized. How do you know if you can trust someone if you never see their face? (Internet, anyone?) Everyone is in hiding: behind burqas and shawls or underneath turbans and beards.
The end of the movie sets like the sun. The resolution is uncertain. Does she make it? Is she trapped forever? We don't know. We can make our own conclusions. Although the answers to the questions are likely to be negative, there is a slim hope that it all turned out OK. This same sort of wan hope is what makes me like the final version of American Beauty better than the earlier scripted version. You can guess what is more likely to have happened "after", but you can still let yourself hope that is all worked out OK.
Maybe I am fooling myself. Life often doesn't work that way. Things frequenty turn out badly. But you have hope, don't you?
