?The Kite Runner?
D: Marc Forster
S: Khalid Abdalla
MANILA, Philippines?Three of the best films we?ve seen on our recent moviegoing marathon feature grown protagonists who look back at their young, hard lives and reflect on the sins of their youth.
Amir, the Afghan-American protagonist of Khaled Hosseini?s astonishing best-selling 2000 novel, ?The Kite Runner,? puts the film?s sensibility and concern more succinctly in the first chapter of the book: ?It?s wrong what they say about the past, about how you can bury it?because it always claws its way out. I realized I?ve been peeking into that deserted alley for the last 26 years? It was my past of unatoned sins.?
In Foster?s gripping screen adaptation of the novel, it?s the lead character?s sins of omission that bring the story to a boil: Successful, California-based writer, Amir (Khalid Abdalla), returns to war-torn and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to save the son of Hassan, the childhood friend he used to fly kites with?and whose trust he betrayed after witnessing a violent crime (we won?t spoil your viewing pleasure with the details).
Foster deftly fuses a very personal story about friendship and betrayal with Afghanistan?s political turmoil and social upheavals.
In his old age, Amir realizes that no amount of success could ?atone? for what he did?until the opportunity to save his departed friend?s son presents itself. And, this time, he fights tooth and nail to pay tribute to that special friendship?and to atone for the sins of his youth!
With the same elegiac quality, Joe Wright?s moving wartime drama, ?Atonement,? chronicles how 13-year-old writer protagonist, Briony Tallis (played by Oscar nominee, Saoirse Ronan, and later by Romola Garai, at age 18, and Vanessa Redgrave in old age), irrevocably wreaks havoc on the lives of her older sister and her lover after she accuses the latter of a crime he didn?t commit.
At film?s end, when Redgrave?s character explains what drove her to write her last book, she delivers a shocking and gut-wrenching revelation?that will linger in viewers? memory for sometime!
Another film, Tony Ayres? must-see Aussie drama, ?The Home Song Stories,? also takes the same storytelling approach. (The movie was shown in the US last January, so it couldn?t compete at the 2007 Oscars, where lead actress Joan Chen could have given Marion Cotillard and Julie Christie a good fight in the Best Actress race.)
As seen through the eyes of the female protagonist?s writer son, the drama follows the story of Rose (Chen), an emotionally unstable Hong Kong songstress who migrates to Melbourne in the turbulent ?60s with her two teenage children to marry a kind, soft-spoken Australian soldier she doesn?t love. Her actions and decisions continue to hover in her children?s minds?long after she commits suicide!
