Marina Golbahari’s strength in Osama is that she never lets us mistake a child coping with hardship for a child equipped to bear it. We rate the performance more highly than the constricted drama around it.
Fi1m perspective
In Osama (2004), Marina Golbahari plays a girl whose family needs her to conceal who she is. The responsibility is too large for a child, and Golbahari lets us see that without making endurance look like maturity. We found the obligation upsetting: the adults need protection from someone who ought to be able to expect it from them. Her performance is the strongest reason to consider a film that gives us too little chance to know its central character.
Siddiq Barmak cast Golbahari without previous acting experience, and the unpolished quality of her work suits the part. That lack of experience should not be mistaken for an explanation of everything she achieves. Casting a child in a distressing story does not, by itself, make us care. Golbahari keeps our attention on the girl even when the writing concentrates on her family's need. The performance succeeds because the pressure never makes her seem any less young, or any less entitled to be looked after.
International attention for Osama was followed chiefly by supporting and smaller roles. Golbahari played Razia in Zolykha's Secret (2006), worked with Barmak again on Opium War (2008), and appeared as a teacher in Mina Walking (2015). Her work has often returned to Afghan women and girls facing hardship, displacement or disguise. Those recurring subjects make the space a script leaves her especially important. Her debut leaves us curious about what she might do in a part with less suffering and more ordinary life.
Our reservation about Osama lies in how narrowly it defines the girl through what her family requires of her. Barmak gets a performance that holds our concern, but the writing leaves our acquaintance with her incomplete. We would not confuse the limits of that part with the limits of the actor playing it. Start there if the premise interests you, and expect a demanding evening rather than a rounded portrait of childhood.
Biography
Marina Golbahari is an Afghan actress. She was discovered on the streets of Kabul by director Siddiq Barmak and cast in the lead role of his film Osama (2003).
The film, the first Afghan feature made after the fall of the Taliban, received a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. Golbahari later appeared in several other films including Opium War (2008) and Act of Dishonour (2010).
She is married to Noorullah Azizi, who works in the Afghan film industry. Golbahari and her husband live in exile in France.
