Watching ‘The Patience Stone’ in Kabul

The cold Friday night was well suited for landi – the dried, preserved meat dish – most commonly served in the winter. Someone from my extended network of cousins had somehow procured an illegal copy of the movie on his thumb drive. So there was the landi delicacy, the movie, cards to play and an unceasing flow of green and black tea. The night was set.

The French-made film started with a deceptive simplicity, a calm that is so at odds with the typical Hollywood movie that aims to dazzle with action, graphics, sound, movement or a combination thereof. As the film went on, it was interspersed with scenes of war and destruction, but the screen adaptation of the book fell somewhere short of being impressive.

The principal actors, mostly Iranians, failed despite their best efforts to mimic the Dari accent. The screenwriters – I don’t know who they are – failed despite their best efforts to produce a genuine Dari screenplay. The use of Karzai-era Afghani in a scene supposedly depicting Jihad-era Afghanistan was a subtle but obvious indicator of how disconnected the filmmakers are from Afghanistan. The random kid with the kite – obligatory in most Afghan-themed films after The Kite Runner – was cliché and unconvincing.

I was focused on these details, but my cousins had other things to focus about the movie. It was raunchy, but everyone kind of knew to expect (and enjoy) that.

In one scene, the female lead’s soliloquy discusses Prophet Muhammad and his relationship with his beloved wife, Ayesha. This is where the first critical note came from the group. Someone said the filmmaker shouldn’t have gone there; it’s sacred space after all. Someone else retorted that the story wouldn’t have won any wards had it not been deliberately provocative.

In that way, the film had the typical European artistic irreverence to it. This “irreverent” attitude could not only offend Muslim sensibilities but also thoroughly anger Afghans because it appears to them as though the artist deliberately sets out to offend an entire people.

The female lead seems connected with her sexuality and is vocal about it in a way that’s taboo for Afghans to imagine – much less talk about or depict on screen. At one point, she reveals that her brother- and father-in-law forced themselves on her regularly when her husband was away on jihad; she also engages in sex for money with a young jihadi fighter and initiates him in the ways of love. She connects with her aunt, a prostitute, and reveals how she, an “infertile” woman, supposedly conceived her two daughters through sex with a “healer” in a dark room. At one point she asks her husband, who is in a vegetative state, what God has done for him after all the years of fighting for His sake?

Afghan familial relations are governed by a sense of pious honor. It should come as no surprise, then, that the movie’s rancid depiction of the family could elicit indignation and vehement protest once it premiers in Afghanistan (if it ever does). There’s no lack of constituency that the movie could offend: the mujahideen, the mullahs, the religious Afghans or, at the very least, the manly Afghan man who prides himself on the sacredness of the Afghan family and the superior purity of the Afghan society.

Protests against films and subsequent bans on those films are not new in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The precedent began with the Bollywood production, Kabul Express, which was banned after protests from Hazaras who felt offended by its portrayal of the ethnic group.

But perhaps because The Patience Stone does not have a cohesive ethnic or linguistic constituency, it will be met only with scoffs and righteous indignation. (The book is set “somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere,” but the movie doesn’t make that clear.)

None of the people in the audience with me seemed much troubled by the provocative aspect of the movie.

An interesting comment came from a wholly unexpected quarter. One of my cousins, in his 40s, had been a village mullah in the late 90s and early 2000s. Mullahs are expected to lead their congregations toward goodness and away from sin. This cousin launched into a think-out-loud session that yielded some interesting remarks.

“When I was a mullah, I condemned – or if within my powers, prohibited – people from watching things that even portrayed women without a headscarf. But now it has all become so common that any such objection from me will make very little sense,” he said.

“Maybe because uncovered female hair and other things are so common now, people don’t feel carnal pleasure seeing them on TV,” he continued.

“And maybe because people don’t derive pleasure, it’s not a sin to watch these things.”

He was a mullah when the Taliban were in power (he didn’t have any connections with them). With these comments, he was stepping well beyond the limits of what is proper for mullahs and adopts views that are openly contrarian and blasphemous by the standards of the conservative religious orthodoxy.

Afghans and some foreign observers claim that Afghanistan is a vastly different country now than it was under the Taliban. Few of these observers can tangibly explain exactly what they mean by this change apart from pointing to the number of students in school, the proliferation of TV channels and the improved road networks.

But, as this mullah’s comments indicate, it’s the evolution in thinking and expectations that has made Afghanistan such a different place now than it was a mere 10 years ago.

And that is a truly sustainable development that will outlast the international community.