A good heart these days is hard to find, and never more so than in the middle of a war zone. Written and directed by Afghanistan’s Shahrbanoo Sadat, who also stars, No Good Men starts off as an amiably lo-fi romantic comedy with a juicy streak of jet-black satire and somehow transforms into a devastating political commentary that gives a whole new meaning to its seemingly tongue-in-cheek title. The way Sadat’s film cleverly weaves western romcom tropes into a story set entirely against the impending fall of Kabul in 2021 is one thing, but its sudden escalation — with just 20 minutes to go — into shocking violence and tangible chaos is a bait-and-switch that takes things to a whole other level.
It starts innocently enough, with Afghan pop music playing over brightly lit images of flowering cacti. Flowers are a major theme in the film, but not always in a good way; indeed, when we meet our heroine Naru (Sadat), she is working as a camerawoman on a cheesy daytime phone-in show where the self-proclaimed “expert” advice is that women — evoking the morbid French chanson “Mon amie la rose” — “lose a petal” every time they get pregnant. “My advice as a doctor,” this patronizing talking head goes on to declare, “is put on a lot of makeup.”
Naru, living with her parents and young son on a sabbatical from her cheating husband, is desperate for a change of scenery, and she gets it when famous Kabul news reporter Qodrat Qadiri (Anwar Hashimi) loses his regular cameraman just as he’s about to interview Mawlawi Sahib, a leading figure in the Taliban. Upset by Qodrat’s probing questions, Sahib affects disgust when Naru’s headscarf falls down and leaves, protesting, “I won’t sit in a room with a bare-headed woman.” To punish Naru for sabotaging the piece, Qodrat dumps her in the center of Kabul, with orders to do some vox pops about Valentine’s Day.
Naru turns out to be pretty good as this, asking the women she meets, “Are there any good men in Afghanistan?” It opens the floodgates, and one interviewee memorably tells her, “I’ve never seen a man who appreciates his wife and speaks kindly to her — it’s just beatings, insults, chores and taking care of the children.” The Kabul TV network are delighted with Naru’s groundbreaking work, so much so that the big boss asks her to, er, film his wedding video.
For a short time, it feels that No Good Men may just turn out to be a simple but well-put airing of grievances, with Naru facing systemic sexism at every turn. But things start to change when Qodrat, after breaking a major news story about a horrific gang rape, gives Naru her dues for helping him interview the female witnesses and even apologizes for his previous behavior. Naru can’t quite believe what’s going on, telling her friends, “I’ve never seen a man behaving so respectfully.” Her admiration only increases when Qodrat comes to her help after a particularly ugly spat with her ex, and a genuine chemistry develops, even though he is much older and hardly fits the bill as a knight in shining armor. There is, however, a catch; Qodrat is taken, having been shanghaied into an arranged marriage as a young man, so Naru decides to cool things down.
The important part of all this is that while Sadat is fooling you into thinking that this is just a simple case of will-they or won’t-they, the violent seeds of unrest shown at the beginning of the film are about to return, and big-time. What started so amiably, with much fun poked at the ineptitude of the Taliban and the Afghan government, takes a really dark turn, with a climax that can best be described as a nightmarish pastiche of Lost in Translation, as imagined by Dante Alighieri. February 14 usually falls within the reach of the Berlin Film Festival, but this is the first time the event has opened with such a provocative bloody Valentine, a modest but super-smart production that punches way above its weight.
Title: No Good Men
Festival: Berlin (World Dramatic Competition)
Director/Screenwriter: Shahrbanoo Sadat
Cast: Shahrbanoo Sadat, Anwar Hashimi, Yasin Negah, Masihullah Tajzai, Torkan Omari, Fatima Hassani
Sales: Lucky Number
Running time: 1 hr 43 mins
