OVP: The Breadwinner (2017)

Film: The Breadwinner (2017)
Stars: Sara Chaudry, Laara Sadiq, Shaista Latif, Ali Badshah, Soma Chhaya, Kawa Ada
Director: Nora Twomey
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The animated feature race at the Oscars, now 16-years-old, has taken on a relatively predictable routine.  The films that win are almost always populist hits, usually from Disney, while the rest of the nominees are a spattering of commercially-driven pictures that don't bring too much shame onto the Academy (all of Laika, movies in the Despicable Me mold), and foreign-language films.  Gone are the days where Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron make the list simply by existing-instead, the Oscars tends to like to find quieter movies to round out the nominees lists before they inevitably hand the statue over to Pixar.  The voting rules have changed this year, perhaps altering this stew, but if the trend continues it's difficult to see The Breadwinner not making it onto the list, as it's in the exact mold of "serious, arthouse driven animation" that has become the recipe to filling out this category.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film itself is just serious enough to not be entirely predictable (in that you can't quite see the ending coming five minutes into the picture like you would be able to a more mainstream animated picture).  The movie centers around Parvana (Chaudry), a precocious young girl in Kabul who goes each day to the market with her father (Badshah), who was a teacher of literature and history, but those subjects have been banned under the Taliban rule.  One day, he defies a young Taliban soldier who insults his daughter and says that she could be his bride, and is arrested.  This leaves Parvana, her sister Soraya (Latif), and her mother (Sadiq) with no way of making money or buying food, as women aren't permitted to work or go to the market without a man in Afghanistan at the time.  Certain to starve to death without some sustenance and source of money, Parvana cuts her hair and dresses as a boy, suddenly realizing the freedom afforded to males in her culture, and in the process befriending another girl-masquerading-as-a-boy Shauzia (Chhaya).  Together they dream of a world where they'd be able to freely sell their wares and perhaps see the ocean.

The movie's backdrop is an interesting time in Afghanistan, as it takes place in the days leading up to the American efforts to root out Al Qaeda, so the bellowing drum of war that eventually consumes the ending of the picture is in fact a war with the United States.  It's a weird framing device that didn't occur to me until my drive home, as they never once mentioned the USA in the film (at least as far as I could tell).  The movie's most interesting theme is what is left unspoken, and how the audience starts to realize it on our own.  You think, for example, of how truly entrapped women are in the picture-that they are essentially destitute if they are not lucky enough to have a husband, son, or brother to aid them in finding food and money, and what a war where many young men will die will mean for their way-of-life.  A recurring side story in the film is Parvana telling her baby brother a bedtime story that is a clearly a metaphor for her dead older brother, whom we eventually learn died while on an errand and picked up a grenade.

The magical realism aspect of the story one could argue both works and doesn't.  It's beautiful animation (the recurring scarlet, teal, and emerald green motif is a winner), but it feels prosaic against the modernity of the story we're seeing in "real life."  Then again, escapism is something that clearly one would have to rely upon to survive in this situation, and it's a constant theme of the movie, with Parvana's father encouraging her to make up stories, perhaps aware as a young woman that her life is not going to get better so why not encourage fantasy until reality will set in, or how Shauzia has hopes of eventually selling her wares on a beach, with us knowing that her fate is almost assuredly one of a marriage arranged by her cruel father.  So it's understandable that Twomey would want to insert some wonder into the story, but it feels more like a distraction, and our reliance upon the reveal of how her brother died as a major climax moment in the picture feels like it steals away from the more interesting story of Parvana's self-discovery.

As a result, I'm going with three stars-the movie is good, but it's nowhere near the best independent movies that AMPAS has chosen in the past.  Still, it's very much in the vein of a movie that will be nominated, so if you're an Oscar completist, this would be worth the ticket price.