The Swallows of Kabul: a successful bet for Zabou Breitman (Review)

A successful first foray into animation for the director of Remembering Beautiful Things.

After The deerat 8:55 p.m.Arte will offer this evening at 10:10 p.m. The Swallows of Kabul. An animated film awarded at the Angoulême festivalthat First advise you. Besides, if you don't want to wait until this second part of the evening, it is already visible for free on the channel's website.

Initially, there is the bestseller by Yasmina Khadra, published in 2002. A firebrand which denounced the obscurantism at work during the time of the Taliban, in Afghanistan, a veritable laboratory of religious fundamentalism which spread throughout the Middle East like wildfire at the turn of the century. The Algerian writer described the dramatic daily life of two couples: the one formed on one side by a prison guard (Atiq, a former mujahideen) and his sick wife (Mussarat), on the other by two young idealists (Mohsen and Zunaira) forced into silence and invisibility. “Men have gone mad; they turned their backs on the day to face the night,” wrote Khadra with mad poetry, coupled with suppressed rage. How to translate horror into images? How can we illustrate this Kabul, a city where “prayers crumble in the fury of machine guns”? By choosing to shoot this adaptation in animation rather than live action to begin with.

PLASTIC SUCCESS
Coming from traditional cinema (the film was originally planned live), Zabou Breitman did not hesitate for a second when the production contacted her, as the concerns at the heart of Les Hirondelles de Kaboul coincide with hers: incommunicability , the difficulty of being in the world, the weight of secrets/mourning… She chose, to accompany him in his long adventure (the film was initiated in 2012, its production took place over three years) , a young graphic designer and animator, Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, whose mastery of watercolor fit perfectly with her desire for abstraction and contrast. Plastically, the result is a marvel. The somewhat muted pastel tones and ethereal features attenuate, even contradict, the barbarity of the subject and of certain scenes such as that, unbearable but fundamental in the story, of a stoning in which Mohsen participates in an uncontrollable impulse. The success of the project is entirely contained in this sequence which manages to show the unshowable while privileging the point of view of Mohsen, this intellectual broken by Sharia law and guilty of the worst. From this precise moment, the film shifts into pure melodrama, the destinies of Mohsen, Zunaira, Atiq and Mussarat finding themselves irremediably linked. The talent of the directors consists in not trying to convince: the known reality of the Taliban regime is here only the sinister backdrop of a story worthy of the greatest tragedies where certain personal trajectories collide with the wall of obscurantism. The Swallows of Kabul is ultimately not a political gesture (which would also be a little backdated) but a humanist film with a much more universal scope.

“REALISM” OF INTERPRETATION
The other decisive choice consisted of having the dubbing actors play their roles beforehand, a performance of which Zabou Breitman recorded. Dressed in appropriate clothing, moving as the characters would in an imaginary space, Simon Abkarian (Atiq), Zita Hanrot (Zunaira), Swann Arlaud (Mohsen) and Hiam Abbass (Mussarat) served as the basis for the animators. The result is a unique impression of realism in the way the characters “live” on screen, with a typically cinematic economy of gestures and words. Here again, the contrast with the extremely stylized visual universe pays off. Bold, ingenious, moving, The Swallows of Kabul proves that animated cinema for adults, too confidential in France (while it has flourished in Japan for a long time), has its full place in theaters.