The Politics of Love in Kabul

This year’s Berlin Film Festival opener, “No Good Men,” is, according to writer-director-actress Shahrbanoo Sadat, the first Afghan rom-com. Sadat began working on its script back in 2019, two years before the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul. The Taliban’s 2021 return to power factored in to the story as it developed — it’s set in the months leading up to the Afghan collapse — but at its core, the movie remains uniquely compelling beyond its political subtext. 

Films from and about Afghanistan tend to foreground American wars. While their impact on society is unavoidable even in “No Good Men” — which employs real footage of violence and political chaos — Sadat’s film is foremost a riveting character piece, one that approaches lived reality in its writing and performance. Its focus is a fiercely independent camerawoman, Naru (played by Sadat herself), who is convinced there are no good men left in the country, but her emotional affair with her older, married co-worker Qodrat Qadiri (Anwar Hashimi) challenges this assertion in surprising and exciting ways.

Naru is married but nominally separated from her unfaithful husband (Masihullah Tajzai). Through a fragile peace with him, she maintains temporary custody of their 3-year-old son Liam (Liam Hussaini). But, as she notes, this could change on a whim since Afghan divorce laws considerably favor men. Her daily routine involves being shepherded to her workplace — a heavily fortified TV studio — by armed guards and uncouth male drivers in a carpool van alongside the station’s other women. Luckily, the studio also has daycare, so Liam is never too far should her ex come to claim him.

Naru’s job involves filming a daytime “women’s program,” in which a male co-host spouts sexist advice about makeup. Her real interests lie in the adjacent offices of Kabul TV, where decisions are made about the news. An enthusiastic go-getter, she entreats her bosses with a supplicating smile, knowing that getting what she wants may be a matter of persistence and politeness — not to mention stroking male egos.

As luck would have it, Naru is needed as a substitute cameraperson for ace on-air reporter Qodrat, a middle-aged TV legend who is to finally interview a Taliban leader after weeks of trying. Qodrat is upset at being assigned a novice camera producer, which Naru interprets as him objecting to working with a woman. Then the Taliban interview subject uses her presence as an excuse to torpedo the segment, leading to further frustrations between the co-workers. But what seems like a dead end for them professionally takes a surprising turn once Qodrat is impressed with Naru’s skills as an on-street interviewer, since she gets female subjects to open up on camera in ways the largely male news team cannot. 

What follows is the delightful interplay of a typical Western rom-com, albeit tilt-shifted for its Kabul setting, where Naru and Qodrat butt heads over their differing approaches to enacting social change. Naru is outspoken against the daily misogyny she experiences, and is quick to make her objections known even toward absurd microaggressions, like a security guard refusing to check her bag for possible explosives despite searching her male peers. Qodrat is more shrewd in his protestations of conservatism, lest he ruffle the wrong feathers and lose journalistic access, or start a fight with someone powerful. Neither one is necessarily wrong in their approach to challenging systemic power. But while Qodrat picks his battles, Naru — as a woman facing a much steeper uphill climb — can’t afford to. 

The tension stemming from Naru and Qodrat’s disagreements yields wonderfully engrossing conversations performed with naturalistic flair. Sadat and Hashimi, the actors playing them, are real-life best friends whose experiences working together as journalists heavily informed the screenplay. In fact, “No Good Men” is the third of Sadat’s films (after “Wolf and Sheep” and “The Orphanage”) based on Hashimi’s unpublished memoirs. (It’s the first in which Sadat has starred and one hopes it won’t be the last.) Her diminutive physical presence is counterbalanced with an alluring radiance and gusto. When contrasted with Hashimi’s more stilted reserve as a weary news veteran, this creates a captivating modern-day screwball comedy dynamic. 

Through deft production design, Brandenburg, Germany, slots effortlessly for Kabul. The film’s backdrop is one of dust and chaos, but Sadat made the key decision to drown out all sound in the rare moments that her lead characters lock eyes and connect despite their differences, as if for the briefest of moments they were the only two people left in the world. In cinema, escapist romance can be gestured toward by expressionistic bombast (as in the recent “Wuthering Heights” adaptation), but it proves infinitely more soul-baring when embodied by quiet longing and the delayed gratification of accidental brushes of skin as the characters deny their desires.

Of course, reality comes rushing back eventually through the impending Taliban takeover. This informs not only where the characters are sent on their next assignments, but the amount of freedom they possess as journalists — and in Naru’s case, as a professional woman trying to escape an unhappy marriage. However, through her hushed conversations with other women in the field — including a more conservative co-worker Layla (Fatima Hassani), and their U.S.-citizen Afghan friend Anita (Torkan Omari), who returns to Kabul to gift them sex toys — “No Good Men” is also afforded some much-needed levity that allows its female characters full lives and sexualities even within the strict social confines in which we meet them.

Chats among the women also contain some of the film’s most vital thematic cues.  These include Naru’s theory that there are no good Afghan men, and an empathetic plea from Anita to more closely consider the traumas Afghan men have experienced through decades of war in order to better understand their learned behaviors. It’s an explanation that, while not broached any further, looms over the film from that point on. Naru, however, dismisses this idea out of hand as a woman who has to deal with the violent and oppressive downstream effects of male psychology. And really, who can blame her?  

Per notes provided to the press at the Berlinale, Sadat’s avoidance of the language of nongovernmental organizations and broad women’s empowerment movements was key to evading the limiting parameters of victimhood within which Afghan women are often seen, especially in global cinema. She succeeds in exceeding these limitations through the camera’s fluid movements, the naturalism of each performance, the warmth with which she films each environment and eventually, the ethical dilemmas that increasingly present themselves as Naru and Qodrat get to know each other. In a brutish, oppressive world, the layered decency that Naru discovers in Qodrat’s cautious behavior is endearing. But the idea that she may have finally discovered a fabled “good man” is, in turn, challenged by the fact that he’s married — which complicates any involvement between them. If he’s a good man, would pursuing him romantically, beyond their fleeting glances and electric silences, no longer make this true?

As rom-coms are inclined to do, the latter half sees a wrench thrown into Naru and Qodrat’s burgeoning relationship, but given the movie’s setting, it’s much heavier than mere misunderstanding. Naru’s crisis of morality is certainly a hurdle, but the challenges facing the characters are all-encompassing, from the patriarchal norms that keep Samir in her orbit to violent reprisals against the journalists attempting to speak truth to power. As the story barrels towards the inevitable chaos of the U.S. military withdrawal, reality can’t help but seep in through the corners of the fantasy in the form of brutal archival news clips that refocus the pressing dangers of time and place. This results in a much more serious third act than one might be used to in rom-coms, but a more touching one as well.

For the star-crossed characters of “No Good Men,” the usual third-act apologies and confessions aren’t merely a matter of effort, but of surmounting impossible political hurdles that make the notion of personal and sexual liberation feel precarious, if not altogether hopeless. In making this alleged first Afghan rom-com, Sadat doesn’t merely transpose the well-worn tropes of existing dramedies to a new setting. She transforms them through a lens of intimate lived experience, and in the process, creates something new entirely.