In Theaters
The Black Tulip
Movie Details
- Genre: Drama, Family
- Running Time: 116 min.
- Director: Sonia Nassery Cole
- Cast: Haji Gul Aser, Sonia Nassery Cole, Walid Amini, Somajia Razaya, Hosna Tanha, Basir Mujaheed, Shafi Sahel, Payenda Joyenda, Sadaf Yarmal, Sayed Rahim Sayeedi
- Producer: Sonia Nassery Cole
- Writers: Sonia Nassery Cole, David Michael O'Neill
- Distributor: Breadwinner Productions
- Official Site: The Black Tulip Official Site
Conservatism clashes with modernity in The Black Tulip, Sonia Nassery Cole's earnestly melodramatic Afghan drama about a family's struggle against the Taliban. To honor her deceased father's memory, Farishta (Cole) and her husband, Hadar (Haji Gul Aser), open a restaurant in 2010 where they promote freedom of expression through open-mic poetry and music. As Hadar fears, this draws the unwanted attention of a still-strong Taliban, who are soon murdering Farishta and Hadar's relatives at weddings and kidnapping their daughter in an attempt to silence any supposed "blasphemy," a narrative course that Cole charts with numerous flashbacks and a preference for overblown slow motion and hysterics. With every character speaking in blunt expository statements and every conflict mapped out in clear black-and-white terms, the action proves simplistic, though Cole does capture a convincing and inviting sense of contemporary Afghanistan, be it the atmosphere of constant fear and paranoia or the many customs and rituals that define daily life. There are good intentions, here, but too little nuance, as epitomized by its movie-villain portrait of the Taliban, whose evil is inarguable, but whose menacing shifting of prayer beads here comes off as the Afghan equivalent of twirling mustaches.
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