The Kite Runner

If you haven’t heard of Khaled Hosseini’s book “The Kite Runner,” you’ve been living under a rock for the last 100 plus weeks that it has been on the “New York Times” best-sellers list. Now a fixture on Starbucks bookshelves across the nation, “The Kite Runner,” when first published, was a list of unknowns: a new author’s first novel and a story about a culture unfamiliar to most mainstream readers. Subduing those question marks required captivating, original fiction.

That challenge, which the novel met so spectacularly, is analogous to the one the new film of the same name faces. “The Kite Runner” is a subtitled film in a language (Dari, the dialect of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan) foreign to most moviegoers; its cast list is populated by no-name actors. Fortunately, the movie largely lives up to the expectations that readers of Hosseini’s book will have.

The selling point of the movie is the plot, which chronicles the life of an Afghani boy, Amir, and his best friend, a young servant-boy named Hassan. The two friends endure a difficult parting-of-ways, and Amir and his father must ultimately leave Afghanistan for America when the Soviets invade. Years later, Amir returns to Kabul in order to save Hassan’s son, a boy he has never met, so that he can atone for past transgressions.

The story is an ambitious one, filled with surprises and spanning decades of Afghani history. The screenplay stays true to the original novel, and Hosseini’s heart-wrenching, page-turning story makes for a smooth transition from best-seller to the big-screen.

Yet despite the narrative’s imaginativeness and unconventionality, what makes it compelling is its believability, a result of the film’s rich character development. Amir’s father (Homayoun Ershadi), a wealthy Pashtun businessman who abhors everything Russian and loves Western cars, embodies the “old days” in Afghanistan, before civil, cold, and anti-terrorism wars lacerated the fabric of Afghan society. But when they flee to San Francisco, Amir and his father become just another pair of immigrants trying to assimilate into an alien culture in a vain attempt to make ends meet.

While Amir was once the only owner of a Mustang in all of Kabul, he is now reduced to servicing others’ Mustangs from behind the counter of a gas station. These scenes could be vignettes from any twentieth-century immigrant’s life in the U.S., and in this respect the film’s themes strike a slightly more universal note than the particulars of the narrative might suggest.

The movie has received a fair amount of attention since the parents of the actor who plays young Hassan requested that the scene in which the boy is raped be removed from the movie altogether. Later, amidst growing concerns about the safety of the child actors in Afghanistan, the release date of the film was delayed six weeks in order to allow the actors to be relocated. Yet for all the controversy surrounding the scene, in its final form, it is brief and relatively tame. Still, the very fact that the movie’s content—its frank treatment of sexual harassment, ethnic tension, corruption, and Islamic fundamentalism—could put these young actors at risk in their real lives illustrates that the story, while a Hollywood production, is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Two contributors who are not unknowns bring Hosseini’s story to life. Director Marc Forster, recently tapped to direct the next James Bond film, manages to imbue the complicated story line with a sense of urgency, no easy feat when you’re filming a movie about the Middle East in China and most of the dialogue is in a language you don’t understand. Composer Alberto Iglesias, who has worked on a number of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, crafts original songs for the film’s soundtrack that complement the movie’s fluid cinematography remarkably well.

In the end the movie works, chiefly because of its success in highlighting the novel’s strengths. So if the Sunday Book Review isn’t your thing, it’s worth giving the cinematic version a try.

—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.