The Breadwinner 2017
Based on overwhelmingly positive reviews, I picked this movie to borrow using a Screen Pass. It is animated by Cartoon Saloon, an Irish studio that also did Song of the Sea which I watched recently. They do kind of highbrow animation that isn’t that popular, but that critics drool over. This movie takes that approach, but starts with an incredibly bleak story about a girl growing up in Kabul under the Taliban. Her parents are beaten by Taliban police and the father is imprisoned for reading books, leaving the family without a man to escort them to the market. If a woman goes to the market alone she is beaten. It took me three nights to watch this entire movie because it is so depressing, but after I got through the first half hour or so of bleakness I thought maybe this is just the setup to show how desperate they are and it will get better. Then I thought after the first hour that it was taking a while for things to get better. Nope. Things never get better and in many ways get much worse. It isn’t that terrible things don’t happen and that life isn’t depressing in any poor country, especially one with a brutal regime like the Taliban. But do I want to watch a movie about that? And an animated one at that? Hey kids, tonight we’re going to watch the most depressing cartoon of all time! Reading up on the movie a little, most of the people who made the movie are Westerners and even the source book is by a Canadian. I‘m sure those people are empathetic, but it isn’t like they lived the story either (the idea was based on some interviews with Afghan families). Watching the movie in 2021, it is that much more depressing because now the Taliban is back and all of the little girls (and big ones) in Afghanistan are going to be facing a lot of the same stuff all over again. The little girl in the movie tells a story which is woven throughout the movie and, tellingly, the author says that was inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth. That rung true: another horribly depressing story involving children that critics fawned over. At least in this movie that inner story isn’t just as scary and bleak as the main one, though not exactly happy as it turns out. As entertainment, this movie just didn’t work for me. I think maybe if there had been any kind of happy ending, even as sort of an epilogue, they could have left the audience with a little hope, but instead every hope for joy is mercilessly squashed.
Written: 05 Oct 2021